


still point

by riptheh



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Dark, Gen, Timey Wimey, and like her trauma but wbk, and the doctor's memories are HAUNTING her, and things are not ok, deals with the destruction of gallifrey in s12 and also the time war, i dont know how else to explain it tbh, maybe? - Freeform, the doctor being psychic is a focus
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:47:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23420422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riptheh/pseuds/riptheh
Summary: Time is the present and the past and the future, and not necessarily in that order. Sometimes, the Doctor sees a death. Sometimes, it hasn't even happened yet.Sometimes, an attempt to stop it might just rip the world apart.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & Graham O'Brien, Thirteenth Doctor & Ryan Sinclair, Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan
Comments: 53
Kudos: 118





	1. quick, said the bird, find them, find them

**Author's Note:**

> I Have Had An Idea. Gonna start this and see what happens. good luck to u all god bless

She shouldn’t have gone back.

Gallifrey is a husk, a wasteland burning in its own ashes. It’s also a trap.

She stares for several linear seconds, counts them one by one in her head, then draws back and slams the door.

—————

“Doctor, are you okay?” 

This is Yaz’s question. It’s always her question—so oft-repeated that it carries the shape of her in its syllables. It’s gotten to the point that it doesn’t matter who says it—though they all do. When she hears the words, she sees Yaz.

On this particular instance when the Doctor looks up, it is indeed Yaz, her eyes glimmering with worry as she stands awkwardly by the console. She’s got her hands in her pockets as if she doesn’t know what to do with them, and one shoe toeing a hole in the flooring. When the Doctor smiles at her wanly, the furrow in her brow only deepens.

“Only you’ve been—” she pauses, the words tilting off her tongue. The Doctor knows exactly what she’s going to say. “Quiet, a bit. Like you’re sad. Or…moping.”

“I’m not,” she replies immediately, and regrets it the moment Yaz flinches. Too harsh. She’s been slipping sometimes—or oftentimes—in the tone of her voice, the stiffness of her mannerisms. Once, before a certain point she refuses to think about, it had been easy. Grin and run and delve into all the mystery that the universe has to offer, and everything can be solved with a little tic-tac-toe. 

Now, she keeps playing tic-tac-toe, but she’s losing on both Xs and Os, and there’s red sand in her boots.

“I _mean_ ,” she tries again, forcing her voice so far into kindness it’s completely out of shape, “I’m just a little tired. Five planets in five days. Even I don’t go that fast, usually. And not just because Graham needs his seven hours.”

“It’s eight.” Yaz’s lip twitches, but her eyes don’t yield. “And if I’m being honest, I’m sort of thinking the same. Only it’s you who’s been setting the pace.”

The Doctor stiffens, her hands on the console. There’s sand on her hands, only there’s not, because lately she’s been scrubbing her hands so hard they’d bled. Vaguely, instinctively, in the back of her mind she scrabbles for an excuse. “Is it?”

“Well, you were the one who suggested the Andeos,” Yaz says, “and that theme park. And the one that—”

“Alright, alright.” The Doctor bends low over the console, and pretends to be busy with something. Problem is, after the fiasco yesterday with the telepathic circuitry, the TARDIS won’t let her near any of the paneling. “Well, I think we all just needed a bit of fun. And a bit of a rest, maybe.”

“Yeah.” Yaz is still watching her, she can feel it. Worried eyes, downturned lips. It burns. “You too, I think. Doctor—”

“Oh!” The Doctor cuts her off just in time, straightening and whirling around so fast she nearly hits her in the face. It works; Yaz takes a step back, and stops talking, as the Doctor claps her hands together. “I’m right, aren’t I? As usual.”

Yaz doesn’t look convinced. The confusion in her brow broadens. “Right about…?”

“Rest.” The Doctor grins broadly, and this time it’s not at all forced. Mainly, because she’s found and out. “I need rest, you need rest. How about I drop you off back in Sheffield for a day or two? You can see your family, I can get some—” she pauses, swallows the dryness in her throat— “sleep. Graham could get seven hours. Or is it eight? Doesn’t matter. He could get nine if he wants, I don’t care.”

And with that she spins back to the controls, taking care not to look into Yaz’s face. She can feel the lingering confusion on her back anyway, the dissatisfaction. For only a moment, she’s quiet.

Then, “Doctor…”

“Oh, you!” The Doctor says loudly, looks up to the console and taps pointedly on a monitor. “C’mon! I said Sheffield!”

The TARDIS chirps, reluctant and knowing. The Doctor doesn’t answer. Behind her, she can sense Yaz’s quiet disappointment.

Then her footsteps turn, and disappear up the stairs.

—————

Gallifrey is red, and burning, and burning, and—

She kneels in the sand, the TARDIS doors open behind her, and stares. Wide, sightless. Her hearts pounding in her chest. In the distance, she can hear the crackle of flame and occasional crash of a building. On the wind, she can smell char.

It hurts. All of it. It hurts so much she can barely breathe, and all she wants is to run away, but where had that gotten her?

_“When’s the last time you’d been home?_ ” he’d asked, and what he’d really meant was _“It’s too late anyway”_.

She hates him. She hates him and she hates herself and she hates the universe for letting this happen, and most of all, she hates that it’s probably better. Gallifrey, tucked in its pocket universe. How long could it have lasted? How could the Time Lords ever be content to be the hideaways, and not the rulers? 

She tries to convince herself of this, and believes it and doesn’t and either way she’s split. The Time Lords are dead, and the universe is better off. The Time Lords are dead, and the universe is one flame darker. 

Doublethink is to hold a contradictory concept in your mind, and believe both sides simultaneously. The Doctor is skilled enough, and she does so shakily, pricking her fingers on either end. 

It only hurts. That’s why she’s here. It hurts, and the smell of retrocausality hangs in her nose, and the screams of those who have died—will die, are dead—rent the air. He must have used temporal weapons to wreak such destruction. It’s the only way to wipe out a people fortified from the reach of time itself.

Temporal weapons, and she knows where he got them, she knows where he learned them. This isn’t just a love letter; it’s a memento just for her. To remind her what she’s done. To remind her what she’s capable of doing.

To remind her that it doesn’t matter who she tries to be. She’s her past, through and through. 

And perhaps it’s self sacrifice, perhaps it’s guilt, perhaps it’s just her own addiction to self-destruction, but the Doctor comes back here again and again, like a toddler pressing her fingers to a hot stove. It burns the first time, and that’s the point.

She has to remember. If she doesn’t, he’s the only one who will, and she can’t bear that.

—————

“Hiking in the floating mountains of Ferionas!” The Doctor pulls the take-off lever, and sends them all flying. Or, sort of. They’ve grown used to it by now, so this time it’s more like an undignified stumble.

“Sorry, where?” Ryan blanches. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

“Oh, you just don’t like hiking,” Yaz shoots back, earning herself a disgruntled glare.

“Oi, I’m great at hiking, thanks,” Ryan replies. “I was thinking for Graham’s sake. And, uh—do they have safety edges?”

“I’m sure they’ve got handrails,” Graham reassures him, then glances to the Doctor. “Er, they do have handrails, right?”

“No handrails!” The Doctor calls, and jabs a button, then another just for good measure. “Don’t need them. The natives of Ferionas can fly. That’s how they get up there, actually.”

Ryan, if possible, pales further. “Uh, we can’t fly, Doctor.”

“Yes, but we can hike!” The TARDIS is already wheezing into a landing, and the Doctor lunges forward and grips the stabilizers. “Don’t worry, Ryan, there’s no sudden drop offs. I don’t think. Well, we’ll be careful.”

Ryan doesn’t look convinced, but at that moment they thud to a halt, and the Doctor is at the door before they have time to raise any objections, pointedly so. They seem to have a lot of objections lately, or comments she doesn’t like, about the bags under her eyes or the red sand she keeps tracking in. It’s an annoyance at this point, and one she’s glad to distract them from.

She flings the doors open with practiced gusto, and steps outside, the fam trailing uncertainly behind. “Look at this! Best hiking this side of the galaxy. You get the most spectacular—oh—”

She steps forward in a way that’s meant to be jaunty, and instead nearly falls flat on her face. Fortunately, she catches herself at the last moment, and only thuds to her knees instead. Her head is in a whirl—all of a sudden, the scenery is spectacularly upside down.

“Doctor!” Yaz rushes forward first—always first—and doesn’t quite catches her, but lays a hand on her should which the Doctor is quick to shrug away.

“M’fine,” she slurs, and it’s almost a truth except she doesn’t know what’s happening. The world around her is wobbly still, and there’s an ugly pit of dread sitting in her gut, as if she’s about to be sick. She pushes it away instead, and drags herself to her feet. “Just—had a bit of a head wonk, that’s all. Nothing out of the ordinary. What about you lot? You lot all right?”

She turns around, and they’re all staring at her, varying degrees of worry on their faces.

“We’re fine, Doc,” Graham says, and almost disappointingly, he looks it. “It’s you who just took the tumble.”

The Doctor scoffs. “Me, tumble? Please, Graham, that was dignified. Now, c’mon, we’ve got some hiking to get in. Don’t want to be out here when it’s dark. Lots of animals, and they like foreign meat.”

“I’m really not into this,” Ryan grumbles behind her, but they follow anyway as she forces herself to march forward. The dizziness is already slipping away, she can feel it. Vertigo, she describes, though it felt nothing like it. Vertigo is a perfectly reasonable explanation. She’ll just have to drink more water, or whatever it is the humans do.

But Yaz catches up to her as they pick their way through an overgrown trail, and matches pace beside her. “Are you sure you’re alright?” she asks, her face pinched with concern. It’s a look the Doctor has grown used to, though not one she can say she likes.

There was a different one she used to wear. Admiration, the Doctor dimly recalls. As if the Doctor could do anything. She misses that look. It was easier to play to.

“I’m fine,” she says, and when Yaz doesn’t look convinced, puts some welly into it. “ _Really._ Just had a wobble. It’s the Time Lord version of vertigo. I just need more water.”

“We didn’t bring water,” Yaz says, and the Doctor can already see the new worry plopping into her brain, the _oh god why are we on a strange hike with wild animals and no water._

“Well, when we get back,” the Doctor says brightly, and forces a smile on her face. The spinning is completely gone, though it’s unfortunately been replaced by a dull ache, throbbing in time with her hearts. Maybe she should be drinking more water. “Don’t worry, it’s not a long height. Just to a lookout and back.”

Yaz doesn’t look convinced. She eyes the Doctor, opens her mouth to say something, then closes it again.

“You wouldn’t put us in danger, would you, Doctor?” she says at last. “I mean, I know you wouldn’t hurt us. But—” she hesitates, then glances back to Graham and Ryan, deep in conversation. Her eyes move over them for a moment, then move back to the Doctor.

“I worry about you,” she says quietly. “And I worry about us too sometimes, because I worry about you. I know you said it’d be dangerous, I know that. But that doesn’t mean on purpose, or—or because you can’t think straight, or you’re too tired to bring us to a planet with the right atmosphere. I just—” she swallows hard, and in the moment, the Doctor can hear her own hearts pounding, her chest cold with realization.

_They see me_ , she thinks wildly, and then, a moment later, _not if I can help it_.

“I just worry that you’re not okay,” she finishes, and her eyes roam over the Doctor, then she lifts a gentle smile on her face. “And you’re part of our family, Doctor. We get to worry about you.”

“I know,” the Doctor says, and the words taste filthy on her tongue, because they’re not a lie, not exactly, but Yasmin Khan has it all wrong. Humans don’t get to worry about her. Not she, with the blood of a thousand planets on her hands. Not she, with more brainpower in her little finger than most supercomputers.

They’re small, and she needs them, but they don’t need her, and they aren’t her family. Not now, and not ever, not when the blood of her own family stains the ground of a planet at the end of the universe.

She had a family, once. She had a people, and a planet, and even a best friend, and now she has—

A hike.

“Oi!” she turns, so abruptly as to startle Yaz, and grins back at the boys. “First one to the lookout gets to choose the next planet!”

————

She drops them off after the hike, and returns.

Gallifrey is the same, and different. Wreckage crumbles, buildings fall, the Citadel burns, and the air—she can taste it now—is decaying. A pocket universe with nothing left to fill it is only a husk, and like anything dead in the universe, it needs to break down and return to atoms. From dust to dust, and ashes to ashes, to be reborn, except that there is nothing to be born again. No living cell exists on this planet, the Master made sure of that. She can feel it anyway, psychically, the severing of so many links. Billions, cut out of the world, with their temporal ghosts left to scream backwards and forwards in time, wailing the grief they never had the chance to.

A billion deaths, frozen in the moment of dying. A billion lives, scattered to ash and bone. She can barely stand to see it. Her fingers dig into red sand, and her throat goes dry, and her nose fills with such a strong scent of decaying flesh that it turns her stomach on its head. 

Ghosts, and ghosts, and more ghosts. Who are they haunting? she wonders. What is there left to tie them down?

Of course, she knows scientifically that ghosts don’t exist. Only temporal echoes, cast into a mire of destruction, screaming and crying with no throats to go hoarse, and eventually they’ll die too, when the pocket universe collapses in on itself. The lights will go out, and the story, one of redemption and rebirth, will end, as short as a children’s tale.

Grief claws at her gut, and she swallows it whole.

She stays there until the ash makes her woozy and the smell makes her lightheaded, and then she staggers back to her feet and enters the TARDIS, ignoring her sympathetic moans, and sets course for Sheffield.

—————

“Ice cream!” The Doctor drags them down the street, past the bookstore, past the pharmacy and the little cafe on the corner, and stops outside an ice cream parlor.

“Ice cream?” Graham asks doubtfully. “I thought you were kidding.”

“Yeah, or that you meant like a spinning ice cream parlor on an asteroid or something.” Yaz too is staring up at the brightly colored sign, shaped like an ice cream cone. “You said you wanted to do something adventurous.”

“What’s more adventurous than trying new flavors?” The Doctor rocks back on her heels, slightly miffed. This is not going how she’d planned. She’d been striving for better relations with the fam lately, which meant scaling back adventures and focusing on the small, boring things. Ice cream, and not spinning ice cream on an asteroid, which is a missed opportunity, she can’t help but think. She knows of at least three ice cream parlors which fit that description, and they’re all excellent.

“Uh—does this mean we’re going to be eating bacon ice cream, or something?” Ryan asks. Beside him, Yaz grimaces.

“I hope not. I can’t eat bacon ice cream. Unless it’s artificial,” she adds. “But still, ew.”

The Doctor takes the liberty to look offended. “Of course not! You lot—” she shakes her head. “Always doubtin’ me. And when I say new flavors, I only mean any flavor you can imagine. Best ice cream shop this side of the galaxy, and I’ve been to all of them.”

“Alright.” Graham is still eying the ice cream parlor. But he looks slightly less doubtful. Or at least, so the Doctor hopes. She’s not so good at reading facial expressions this time around. Or moods.

Wasn’t so good at reading them the last time around either.

“Well, if there aren’t any weird flavors, I’m down for some ice cream.” Ryan is the first to step aside, which the Doctor accepts as a show of good faith. “Thanks, Doctor.” 

“Me too.” Yaz follows, and when Graham doesn’t, gives him a look. “Oh, c’mon, Graham! You always get pistachio anyway, and everybody knows that’s weird.”

“Oi!” Graham objects, but follows, if only to argue for himself. “That is not weird! Loads of people love pistachio. Doc, back me up.”

“Sorry, Graham.” The Doctor holds the door for them all, wincing as the bell jangles. “Not a fan of pistachio myself.”

Graham huffs ahead of her, and moves to the counter. “Oh, why do I even bother?”

—————

The ice cream is good, but too cold to eat inside the air-conditioned shop, so they eat outside, basking in the hot summer sun.

“Okay, Doc, I’ll give you this one.” The first to have finished his cone, Graham leans forward and snags a napkin off the table to wipe his sticky hands. “That was probably the best ice cream I’ve ever had.”

“Probably?” the Doctor exclaims, flinging her hands out so wide she nearly tosses her half-eaten cone into the nearby rubbish bin. “Are you kidding? They have a one hundred percent five star score on Yap.”

“Do you mean Yelp?” Ryan is busy with his own cone, which is melting faster than he can eat it.

The Doctor scoffs. “Please. Yelp doesn’t survive the twenty-first century. Yap is created sometime around the 2040s, and overtakes the whole reviewing business. Nowadays, nobody will go to a restaurant that isn’t Yap certified.”

“That’s interesting, Doctor,” Yaz says, only half paying attention. She’s the only one who’s attempted to tackled her ice cream with a spoon. “What year are we in again?”

The Doctor leans back in her chair, ice cream cone half forgotten in her hand. “2072. Nice year, not much happens.” _Which is why I brought you here_ , she thinks silently. “But, this is the year this particular ice cream parlor is at its best. Next year, they change all the flavors and go—go—”

“Doctor?” Yaz looks up, and the Doctor blinks at her, opens her mouth to say something, and never quite gets there. The world is sliding apart slowly, weaving like she’s underwater, and in her ears she can hear the echo of the physical plane far removed. She’s distant, stuck, fading—and she feels like she’s going to throw up.

“I—” she swallows hard, doubles over to clutch her stomach, wonders if she’s really about to through up that fantastic ice cream, and that’s when she hears it.

A scream, renting the air. Thoughts, flooded with panic, of a person she doesn’t know or recognize, and before she can think, before she can process, before she can disconnect, the Doctor keels forward and experiences death.

It’s not her own, she can feel it. Still, the air sucks from her lungs and her skin goes pale and pain, pain, pain races up her body, arcs over her scalp as something tears through her chest—

She’s lying on sand, she thinks for a bleary moment, and there are tears in her eyes. Then she blinks and realizes that she’s lying on pavement, and the sand is only dirt tracked over from the nearby park, and she is alive.

She’s alive. She’s alive, and someone else is dead.

“Doctor?” Yaz pushes her ice cream cup to the side and sinks to her knees beside her, hand hovering as if she wants to help but doesn’t know how. “Are you okay? You just convulsed, and then—and then—”

And then someone died. The Doctor closes her eyes, sucks in a breath, feels the welcoming air fill her lungs, and revels in it.

“I think I saw someone die,” she says, and knows the moment that she says the words that she’s wrong. “No—”

And then she’s pushing herself to her feet, staggering, as Yaz scrambles upright as well, worry writ across her face. Something mint green with bits in it swims blearily in her vision, and then she realizes it’s her ice cream cone, splattered across the ground.

A shame, she thinks. Next year they take the mint choco out of commission entirely.

“You saw someone die?” Ryan is on his feet as well, though Yaz clearly beat him to it, his cone melting all over his hand. “Doctor, how—?”

The Doctor shakes her head, swaying, her whole world spinning slowly. Can’t concentrate. Need to. There’s no sand under her shoes, she can feel it, but the mint on her tongue tastes like ash.

“Psychic,” she mutters, then shakes her head again. “No, that’s not it. Well, sort of. We have to find them.” 

Then she turns, shakily, and it’s Yaz who catches her by the arm. For once, demanding answers.

“Wait,” she says firmly, and the Doctor, in another timeline, is dimly impressed. “How can we find them? No offense, Doctor, but—they’re dead.”

The Doctor pauses, and bites her tongue gently, holding back. Humans, she reminds herself. Incredibly linear.

She turns, and looks Yaz square in the eye. Her words are soft.

“It’s a psychic echo from the future,” she says. “Soon, somebody is going to die. Unless—” she pauses, looks pointedly at Yaz’s hand on her sleeve. She draws it back, abashed, and the Doctor continues.

“—unless I can stop it,” she says. “Now, c’mon. I have a life to save.”

With that she turns and takes off, and behind her, not a moment later, they start to follow.


	2. the dance along the artery, the circulation of the lymph

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whats editing whats sense we don't know
> 
> BLESS u all for your kind comments its you guys who encourage me to write and post fr yall are amazing thank you

Gallifrey burns endlessly, inexorably, and it’s almost beautiful.

Plumes of smoke, steady and wide. Tongues of flame and ash that falls like snow against an orange sky. A bonfire, splashed against the dark. Madly, she wants to warm her hands in it.

Is this him? she wonders. Is this how he felt, when he burned it all to the ground? She almost wants to ask.

Useless. She knows what he’d say.

_How did it feel for you, Doctor?_

It felt like a thousand worlds ending, even though it’d only been one. It felt like she was facing the universe with nothing at her back. It felt, most of all, like loneliness, instinctual and desperate and quiet, and she’d never been able to shake that feeling, not even when she’d set it all right, and now she never, ever will.

Loneliness, she thinks, is the backdrop of the universe. There is much more void between stars than there are stars themselves. Is it foolish to think she wouldn’t eventually fall into it?

Sometimes, sitting on that hillside, watching a home she never even liked burn, she only wishes she were dead. 

But that wouldn’t fix anything. If loneliness is the void between stars, then death is the ultimate void of all. Everybody faces it friendless. Now, in this moment, it scares her more than ever.

—————

They follow her into the TARDIS, and don’t ask questions until they’ve taken off.

Then, as these things go, they all spill out at once.

“Where are we going?” Yaz is first, always first, leaning against the console with her hands gripping the edges. Technically, it’s allowed, but the Doctor forces herself to bite back a reprimand.

“Don’t know,” she replies, and jumps up to yank down her psychic decryptor, cursing her height the whole time. She’d never had to jump when she’d been the eyebrows. 

“Don’t know?” Graham balks, and balks even more as she pulls the headgear towards her and jams it onto her skull. “Doc, don’t you think it’s a little rash to go charging off—”

“Somebody’s life is at stake, Graham.” She cuts him off, grimacing as she adjusts the headgear. It’s too big for her—everything is too damn big for her. “I don’t know where they are, or who they are, or how far into the future their death might be. But we have to find them before it happens.”

“But you don’t even know what you’re goin’ up against!” Ryan protests. “Doctor, what if it’s, I dunno, a trap or something?”

“Won’t be a trap.” She’s fiddling with the knobs as she speaks, and bracing herself—this is going to hurt. “Nobody in this universe can get inside my mind like that, Ryan. Which is also a good question, now I’m mentioning it, but—” she shrugs it off, and twists a dial, then looks up at them. All of them, standing there uneasily by the console, uncertainty written across their faces.

“You don’t have to come,” she says softly. “Any of you. I can drop you off in Sheffield, I don’t mind. You have a choice.”

Silence. There’s always a moment of silence with questions such as these, but her stomach drops anyway, just in case. Of course, if they choose to stay home, she’ll never think any less of them, won’t even consider the thought of it, but—

Well. It might sting a little, is all.

But the moment passes, and then Yaz speaks, and she knows immediately she’s speaking for them all. “We’re with you, Doctor. You know that. It’s just—” she hesitates— “we want to know what we’re doing. Or where we’re going, at least.”

Relief. It sweeps through her like a tidal wave, and Rassilon help her if she shows it on her face. Embarrassing, to say the least.

She doesn’t. Instead, she straightens, and shoots them all a smile, only sightly edged with impatience. “Brilliant! And you’re right, Yasmin Khan, you are absolutely right. Ten points. Have I given points recently? Have twenty.”

She turns back to the console, and thumbs a button. Above her, the TARDIS lets out a wary beep. “And as for where we’re going—I can tell you that right now.”

“How?” Ryan asks, and this time the Doctor completely ignores the TARDIS’s moan to shoot him a grin. “Like this.”

She jabs a final button, and pain arcs through her head. Blinding, white hot and entirely psychic. Distantly, she hears the combined yells of the fam, and moments later, comes to on the floor.

Twice on the floor in one day. She wishes she could say it were a record.

Yaz’s face looms in her vision, worried and reproachful.

“You could have told us you were going to do that!” she says as the Doctor heaves herself to her elbows. “Doctor—”

She cuts off as the Doctor, gasping, waves a hand to silence her.

“Sheffield,” she says, hearts pounding, ears ringing. A death not her own floats behind her eyelids. “We’re going to Sheffield.”

—————

Sheffield is a shimmering twilight of rain and fog, and they step shivering into the gloom, drawing thin jackets tight about them. 

“Do we have time to run back and get coats?” Ryan asks no-one in particular. The Doctor answers him anyway.

“No.” She’s striding ahead, boots splashing mindlessly through oil slick puddles. The rain is a haze around her, barely hard enough to prick her scalp, but thick enough to soak through her coat and chill the bone beneath. She squints, and the world swims, lazy and disjointed.

Her head aches. Sheffield is blue, and she can feel it. Dark, ocean-thick, cold, and she doesn’t like it. How do they ever live here?

“No time.” She connects the second half of her thought a second later, pushing through whatever fog has wrapped around her mind. Death fills her nostrils, and it’s not her own, but it lingers anyway. Where is she? she thinks for a panicky second, then recalls. Sheffield. Mystery. A death that can be prevented.

Normalcy. She wraps herself in it like a blanket, comforting. A brick wall around her thoughts, which are sliding every which way, shaken like pennies in a piggy bank. 

Aftereffects of a death foreseen. She’s a little dizzy, and that’s all it is. She’ll solve the mystery, and take a good nap after this, and things will be fine.

Things will be fine.

“No time for jackets?” Ryan struggles to catch up with her, and the other two trail behind. She can feel them exchanging looks, or maybe she’s imagining it. “Doctor, it’s bloody near freez—”

“No time,” she repeats, and turns a corner onto a bustling street, stopping so fast he nearly runs right into her. She draws her sonic out, scans it over the street, then peers close. “We don’t know when this person dies, so time is critical. We need to find them first, and I don’t even know where they are.”

“Sheffield is a start,” Graham offers, and the Doctor nods, half-distracted. She’s still staring at the sonic, which is giving her almost nothing of importance. No alien interaction. No clues.

Maybe the death isn’t alien. Maybe it’s bare, boring, human.

Mundane. That makes her task harder.

“Uh, Doctor?” Yaz clears her throat, and the Doctor jerks back to life, shoving her sonic in her pocket and spinning around. Guiltily, and she’s not sure why. As if she’s hiding something. 

“Hmmmm?” Sonic tucked behind her back, impatience buzzing at the base of her skull. Her head is throbbing.

“Do you have anymore clues?” Yaz is staring at her, uncertain and worried, and isn’t that the common look these days? Her eyes roam uneasily over the Doctor’s face, and she hesitates, shifting on her feet. “From what you saw. We can’t just search all of Sheffield. We need somewhere to start.”

“Ah.” The Doctor stares at her, half-lost in thought. She’s right, is the problem, and also not, because the Doctor doesn’t have time to waste explaining. Time is ticking by, perilously linear, and she doesn’t even have time to bend it out of shape.

She doesn’t tell Yaz that. Instead she swallows, then closes her eyes hard, and reaches back for that death. 

She doesn’t want to. It hurts, and not the good kind of hurt, not the hurt she deserves, but the kind that’s rudely intrusive in a what have I done now? sort of way. But she finds it anyway, carved into her memory, sharp and demanding attention, so recent it scalds. A scream, echoing in her ears. A pain that tears her chest right through and sucks the air from her lungs. The feeling that she only knows in the spare second before regeneration, when everything comes apart.

When she opens her eyes, she at least has an inkling.

“Young.” She pauses, gropes back for more details. “A woman, I think. Maybe your age, maybe older. She’s wearing—” she rummages once more— “something red.” She stops. “Is that enough for you?”

She doesn’t mean it to sound snappish, but it does anyway. Graham frowns, and Ryan shifts, sticking his hands in his pockets. Only Yaz is watching her expectantly.

“Well, it’s better than nothing.” She bites her lip. “I still don’t know how we’re meant to search all of Sheffield, though. We don’t even know how long we have.”

The Doctor almost huffs. Almost. It’s tempting, in this moment, to cross her arms and act childish, because they don’t get it. They really don’t. Humans, stuck always on the details of things, on the impossible rather than what’s behind it. Treating her like she’s acting crazy, when all she’s trying to do is what she always does. Save lives. Help people. Find what needs fixing, and fix it.

She’s the Doctor, she thinks irritably, desperately, and isn’t that enough for them?

“We have to try,” she says instead, not crossing her arms, not huffing, though she comes dangerously close to the last part. Her head hurts too much for this, she thinks distantly, and then, rather bitterly, that she likes them better when they don’t ask questions. “We’ll split up, take the city piece by piece. We won’t look for a woman in a red shirt, that’s like searching for a needle in a haystack. We’ll look for—” she pauses, thinks— “something strange. Alien, and we’ll rule that out before we look for the mundane. Sound good?”

It’s a plan, she thinks with vague pride. One they might even buy. And sure enough, Yaz stops worrying her lip between her teeth and sets back on her heels, dissatisfied but apparently accepting. And that’s enough for the Doctor.

Better this way besides, she thinks. She works best alone, if she’s being honest. No distractions, no need to explain. Sometimes she loves it, of course, but not recently, when it’s hard enough to focus on her own.

Her head aches, and the world swims in dreary blue. How much more conversation, she wonders, can she take? Soon enough, she’ll bite all their heads off.

“Alright, Doc.” It’s Graham who steps forward, with more certainty than what’s displayed on his face. “I can ask my bus driver buddies, see what’s up. Ryan and Yaz, can, uh—”

“I’ll ask at the station,” Yaz puts in eagerly, then pauses, wrinkling her nose. “And maybe put down for another couple of days off, so they stop asking questions.”

“And I can ask my friends.” Ryan rolls his shoulders, his hands in his pockets. He, out of all of them, appears the most unsure. “I mean, I don’t know how much they’ll know, but—”

“It helps,” the Doctor says. “It will. I’m sure of it.” She rocks back on her heels and eyes them all with a grin that doesn’t entirely cover her weariness. The cold is seeping right through her coat, raising goosebumps. Rassilon, she hates the cold. “Alright. Look at us! Solving a mystery.” She holds her grin until at least Yaz returns it, tentative but hopeful. It’s good, she thinks, mustering up as much zeal as she can. They need this kind of thing, the lot of them. Solving a mystery, saving a woman. The kind of thing they used to do happily, before—

Her smile drops, only a fraction. She keeps it plastered upon her face, but she might as well be frozen.

“—we’ll get going then,” Yaz is saying, and only in that moment does the Doctor realize she hasn’t been listening. “So, six in the evening? We can meet in that cafe.” She nods behind the Doctor, to a coffee shop sitting catty-corner at the turn. The Doctor twists to look, and wordlessly nods.

“Alright.” Ryan claps his hands together, rubs them with vigor against the cold. He shudders, then looks to Graham. “You ready, grandad? We can take the bus from here.”

“Sure.” Graham glances uneasily to the Doctor, who is still watching them, distantly. “And maybe you ought to get out of the cold, Doc. You don’t look all that well.”

“Me?” The Doctor shakes her head, and droplets fly. She should have put her hold up, she thinks with a twinge of annoyance. “Nah, I’m fine. Just going to check out the streets, scan the area.” She holds up her sonic, then, before they can raise anymore objections, spins on her heel in the opposite direction. 

“Six p.m.!” she hollers over her shoulder. “Just like I said!”

She catches a low grumble (”that was _my_ idea,”) from Ryan, but two steps take her out of earshot, and another five take her around the corner, out of sight and out of condemnation.

Only then does she find the side of that cafe and sag against it, her head spinning. Shakily, she draws in a breath, then presses her knuckles into her eyes, hard enough that she sees stars.

The cold, she thinks. She’s getting a bit under the weather. Bloody England, with the constant rain and the freezing temperatures. It’s half the reason she always wears a coat. 

She stays like that for nearly ten seconds, counting each one, then slowly lowers her hands and blinks. The stars continue for a spare moment, dancing slowly in her vision. Then they too fade, and she’s only staring across the street, watching an old man fiddle with an unopened umbrella. The rain is coming down harder now, and she plays momentarily with the idea of helping him, then wonders if that’s who she is. Somebody who crosses the street to help an old man open an umbrella. She thinks she might be, but she isn’t sure of anything anymore.

A person who will wipe out worlds for the greater good. A person who will help an old man open an umbrella. Is it possible to be one and the same? Despite her affinity for doublethink, she can’t hold the two in her mind. 

And anyways, she thinks bitterly, she hasn’t even moved. She’s only watching. Staring, in fact, which is probably a bit odd now she thinks about, and any moment the man will fix his umbrella and look up—and look up—he’s looking up—

He’s looking at her.

Staring, in fact, and his eyes are wide enough to see the whites, but the pupils, the pupils bore into her like maggots into a dead body, repulsive and eager and strange. She draws back immediately, instinctively, and then feels a flash of shame because she’s the Doctor, for goodness sake, but all the same—

The man is dead. She knows it intimately, the way she can taste the separate molecules that split the rain on her shoulders. The man is dead and withering away by the second, his skin turning putrid and rotten, his eyes bursting out of his head, his timeline a mess of beautiful gold and black and the world around him swirling into—

She doesn’t realize she’s stepping into the road until a car sails around her, the horn wailing.

“Get out of the road, idiot!” the driver yells, and it jerks her back to reality. She stops, stupidly, gawking, as a gust of wind blows raindrops right into her face. The man is fiddling with his umbrella, struggling to get it open. The rain collects on her shoulders, soaks her hair.

Everything is normal, except for the fact that she’s standing in the road. The man gets his umbrella open, raises it over his head, and hurries off without a separate glance. She wonders if he knows he’s dying.

Only he can’t be. None of them can’t be, because the world doesn’t work like that. Timelines don’t unwind except in wars that never happened and don’t exist, and people don’t wither and die before her very eyes. Not on Earth, and not in the twenty-first century.

She’s going insane.

The Doctor turns on her heel, water soaking right through her boot, and scrapes her way back to the curb, shivering the whole time. Her teeth are chattering, the tips of her fingers turning numb.

Hypothermia, she thinks, and then, _inside_. She needs to get inside. Warm up for a minute, get her thoughts in order, before she goes out searching. She has plenty of time, probably. They’d landed around one, planned a rendezvous at six. The cafe is right there, and she won’t stray far.

She just needs…light. A moment in the warmth, just so her clothes will dry and her nose will stop running. It’s a cold, she’s sure of it, which is funny because she’s told Yaz she doesn’t get colds, but everybody needs to be hoisted by their own petard once in a while. It’s probably good for her character. Maybe.

She can’t find the cafe. It was on the corner, she’s pretty sure, but the corner is empty and down the street there’s a Tesco, its windows brightly lit and beckoning against a darkening sky. The rain is starting to lash, and the people on the street are giving her odd looks—unless she’s imagining it—so she gives up on the cafe and slips inside the shop, which is immediately, wonderfully, warm.

It’s also very empty. There are a few cashiers, no customers, and one sole employee stocking the shelves. The Doctor avoids her out of politeness, and instead wanders through the produce aisle, stopping to examine the various fruits and vegetables. None are in very good condition. The mangoes are green and hard, the avocados too soft. The tomatoes have black spots, and she wrinkles her nose as she passes.

It’s a strange, blank canvas, the shop. The aisles are strips of light, the shelves stacked high and foreboding. Some are empty without explanation. Others spill over onto carts left half-unloaded, as if somebody had gotten up in the middle of the job and left.

One stocker, the Doctor thinks with fond sympathy. Probably got her hands full.

Away from the rain, away from the cold and the wind and the dark, she’s feeling better. Her hands have stopped shaking. Even the dizziness has receded slightly, though her head still throbs with rhythmic blue. She can almost taste it on her tongue, over the artificial scent of plastic and lysol. 

Just a cold, she reminds herself. A wobble, and that makes sense, because when was the last time she’d slept? She can’t recall. It drags at her now, the weariness and fading adrenaline that comes from fear, and she thinks, vaguely, that she would like nothing more than to lie down with a loaf of bread as a pillow and go to sleep.

“Ma’am, do you need something?”

The Doctor blinks, and looks up. She’s not using a loaf of bread as a pillow. She can tell because something hard and plastic is jutting into the back of her skull, and when she reaches behind to feel it out, her fingers brush a plastic price sign. She’s slumped upon the floor, apparently, and a woman—the stocker—is staring at her, eyes crinkled in motherly concern, though she couldn’t be more than thirty. No—the Doctor breathes in through her nose—twenty seven. She can tell by the hairspray, which is currently doing a fantastically bad job of slicking back curly blond hair.

“Ma’am,” the woman repeats, and internally, the Doctor groans. She hadn’t meant to bother. Doesn’t mean to bother in general, except when it’s worth it. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” the Doctor replies immediately, the words slurring off her tongue. Oh—looks like the dizziness is back. The woman is swimming before her very eyes. “I mean—” she struggles to her feet, nearly pulling a loaf of bread off the shelf— “sorry. Just had a bit of a wobble. Are you okay? Looks like you could use help stocking the shelves, uh—” She looks for a nametag, and doesn’t find one. —Karen?”

The woman’s eyes crinkle, but this time it looks like she’s trying not to laugh. “Jillian, if you want to know. No nametag, left my vest at home.” She sticks out a hand, and the Doctor swallows her pride and takes it. “Now, what are you doing having a lie-in in the bread aisle?”

“Didn’t seem right to do it in produce,” the Doctor mutters, glancing towards the front of the shop. She can barely make out the enormous glass windows, or what’s beyond. The sky is nothing but roiling darkness, alive and malevolent. “Sorry, what time is it?”

“Around six,” Jillian says, following the Doctor’s gaze with some confusion. “Listen, it might not be my place to ask, but—”

“No.” The Doctor doesn’t even look at her. She’s staring at the front windows, dread rising in her gut. The world is tilting, not in her vision, but in a way that’s far more real. “No, wait, that can’t be—”

“Dear—”

But the Doctor ignores her, brushing past and stumbling out of the bread aisle, past the bored cashiers who don’t even look up, to the glass sliding doors beyond which darkness whirls. It’s not ordinary darkness, she can tell just by looking at it, but something malevolent and eager and hungry, and by the time she’s through the doors and practically falling onto the pavement, she has her sonic out and above her head.

“What are you?” she cries, and the wind whips her words away, but there’s nobody around to hear. The street has gone silent but for the gale of an oncoming storm, and the rain hits her face, black and putrid, and the sky above her churns and laughs and breathes, and in her chest her hearts hammer an arrhythmic beat, dread building in her throat, flooding her mouth—

Something is wrong. Something is wrong. The world has gone sideways and tilted into a nightmare, and her fam are out there, waiting and wondering and in danger, and she is very, very la—

“Doctor?”

The world tips, and settles. The Doctor lowers her sonic, and realizes a moment later that she’s not holding it up. She blinks, and three faces swim into her vision.

“We were sayin’—” Ryan pauses, eyes her with concern. “—we didn’t find anything. Any of us. Not even at the station.”

“Yeah,” Yaz puts in with a vague air of disappointment. Her eyes fall to her coffee, steaming on the table in front of her. The Doctor’s eyes fall to it as well, and then to her own.

A cappuccino. Both hands clasped around it, warmth seeping through her fingers. Next to her, Graham stores sugar into his.

The Doctor gazes blankly at her cup, then looks up.

“What time is it?” she asks. Her throat has gone very dry. The cafe smells like coffee grounds and sweet pastries, and it’s almost more than she can take.

“Six fifteen,” Yaz says. She’s watching the Doctor, a wrinkle in her brow. “Doctor, are you okay? You looked like you were dozing off, just a second ago.”

“Dozing off,” the Doctor echoes blankly. There’s a heart shaped into the foam of her cappuccino. She hasn’t even touched it. “Sorry, I think I—”

She looks outside, to the rain-scattered window and beyond. It’s a dreary evening, gray and cold, even through the glass. Dusk has just started to settle. 

“—I think I have a cold,” she murmurs.


	3. neither ascent nor decline

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello i am back  
> its a short one BUT next one will be longer i have PlansTM

They stare at her.

“A cold?” Graham breaks the silence first, drawing her gaze reluctantly from the window. Blatant disbelief moves across his face. “Doc, no offense, but you look like you’re on death’s door.”

“Yeah, and you’re soaked.” Ryan nods to her coat, and she looks down to find that he’s right. Her hair, as well, is plastered to her forehead. “How long were you out there for?”

A few minutes. Several hours. She doesn’t know. She swallows hard. “Not long,” she hedges. “Sheltered in a shop when it got bad.”

“It’s been bad all day.” Yaz is still watching her expectantly, as if waiting for a reason, or possibly just another excuse. “Honestly, we might have picked the worst day to launch an investigation.”

The Doctor frowns. Her head is pounding, or is that just her hearts? One beat, not two. Has to be her head. Her gaze drifts back to the window, though there’s nothing out of the ordinary to see. “There’s never a bad day for an investigation, Yaz. Not when somebody’s life is at stake.”

“Yeah.” Graham leans forward, waving a hand slightly to catch her eye. “Only we still haven’t found anything, Doc. Unless you did.”

“Did you?” Ryan leans forward as well, intent and waiting. “Because if you didn’t—”

“Not yet.” She rips her gaze from th window, and cringes at the collective fall of their faces. “But I’m not giving up. And neither are you lot.”

It comes out, as most things come out these days, harsher than it sounds. She sees it in the curl of Ryan’s lip, the wrinkle in Yaz’s brow. Nice, she’s forgotten to be nice again. Inwardly, she groans. And then, besides, she feels a flash of fear. How can they keep investigating when the world is—when the world is—

When the world is changing beneath her very feet?

But it’s not, she reminds herself. It isn’t because she’s sitting in a cafe with her fingers wrapped around a mug and her fam beside her. The world is not changing. She just—

Had a bit of a wobble.

“Doctor?” It’s Yaz again, that oft-repeated question perched on her lips. “Are you—?”

“Fine.” She gets it out before Yaz finishes her question. Then she stretches a smile across her face, so wide it’s nearly unbelievable. Her eyes dart back to the window once, just as rain begins to hit the glass. “I told you, I have a cold. Now, about the investigation—”

“Mate—” Ryan begins, uncertainty ringing clear. “You really don’t look—”

There’s a figure across the street. Nearly invisible, but for the street lamp above him. Ryan is talking, but she drowns him out and squints, because she knows that shape. Sort of. Maybe. Or at least, she’s seen him before, and it might be—

She’s on her feet before she realizes she’s moving, cutting off the admonishment she hadn’t been listening to anyway. “Found something,” she gets out, and ignores Graham’s indignant ‘oi!’ to push past him, out of the booth and towards the door, creaking under the rain and wind.

The fam follow her, and she barely registers. She barrels out the door instead, shrugging her coat tight against the wind and rain—it’s really picking up—and doesn’t look either way when she crosses the street. Behind her, Yaz shouts, but she doesn’t look back. 

She knows that man. Well, knows is a strong word, but she recognizes him. Old, vaguely frail, fiddling with a windswept umbrella. He doesn’t even look up until she’s right in front of him, and then he frowns.

“Can I help you with something?”

“Yes.” The Doctor plunges her hand into her pocket and withdraws her sonic, which she waves over him in one pass, ignoring the way he draws back in surprise.

“Excuse me—”

“It’s safe.” She finishes her sweep and brings the sonic to her nose to examine. The man is gaping at her, the umbrella dangling from his hands. Rain pelts him, and he doesn’t seem to notice. “Well, unless you happen to be from planet Agerixa, but I don’t think—”

“Doctor!” Yaz, panting catches up to her first, and flashes the man an apologetic look. “What are you doing?”

“Found a clue.” She frowns, squinting at the sonic. “I think. I mean, the sonic isn’t showing anything yet, but maybe if I—”

“Clue for what?” The man is paling, and his eyes dart between the Doctor and Yaz, then to Graham and Ryan, straggling over at last. “I’m sorry, but who are—”

“Police.” Yaz shoots him a winning grin, which the Doctor only just catches out of the corner of her eye. “Conducting an investigation. My partner just wanted to stop and ask you a few questions, _right_ , Doctor?”

“Hmmm?” The Doctor doesn’t look up until Yaz coughs pointedly. Then she does, and a moment later drags a big grin onto her face. “Oh, yes! Questions! I did have one, actually. Have you died, lately?”

This time, the man goes white as a ghost. “I’m sorry, what?”

“ _Doctor_.” Yaz pulls the Doctor away by the sleeve, shooting the man yet another apologetic grin. The Doctor follows reluctantly, one eye still half-peeled for the readings that have yet to produce anything. She can’t tell if they’re still loading, or just being obstinately vague. “What are you doing?”

“Investigating,” the Doctor replies, and glances to the man, who is now being reassured by Graham and Ryan. They aren’t doing a very good job, by the looks of things. “Why, what’s wrong?”

Yaz stares at her for a long moment, her jaw hanging. Then she snaps it shut, and huffs. “What’s _wrong_ is that you’re scaring that poor old man over there! Doctor, please, can you just tell is what’s going on?”

“Uh—” The Doctor opens her mouth, then closes it again. Her sonic slowly lowers, until it’s pointing at her shin. Has she been rude? she wonders, and then decides that, as usual, the answer is _probably_. “I saw him before. Noticed something odd, and didn’t get the chance to scan him. That’s all.”

That’s not all, but it’s about everything she’s going to give. The world is wavering around her, but the nightmarish events of the afternoon—were they the afternoon?—is fading from her grasp. She feels as if she dreamed it, but she can’t remember falling asleep. She blinks at Yaz, and her vision is tinted blue.

Bloody rain. 

Yaz looks at her as if she wants to ask another question, and indeed, is about to. She opens her mouth and takes in a breath, words ready to fall, and that’s when the sonic goes off.

“Yes—result!” The Doctor yanks the sonic up, and grins, a real grin this time, when she catches the readings. “I’m telling you, there was something odd about—” she catches herself and glances over her shoulder, but the man is walking away— “him. Knew it, I just needed the proof.”

“Uh—right.” Yaz doesn’t look as if she wants to let the matter slide, but at least, the Doctor thinks, she appears willing to put it to the side. “What’d you find, then?”

The Doctor frowns at her sonic as Graham and Ryan sidle up beside her.

“Rude bloke,” Graham grumbles, and wipes a stray raindrop from his nose. They’re all getting soaked, standing out here. “Wouldn’t even let me help him fix his umbrella.”

“Yeah, because the Doctor scared him witless,” Ryan retorts, and gives the Doctor a pointed look, which she ignores. “Did you at least get anything off him? Because—”

“Psychic energy,” the Doctor pronounces proudly, and extends the sonic out in front of her, grinning as it continues to beep. “Loads of it, and there’s a trail. C’mon, gang! No rest for the wicked.”

“Or the soaked,” Ryan mutters, but they take off after her as she strides ahead, coat flapping limply in the rain. Excitement propels her, scrapes away the linger dizziness and transforms it until a dull, single beat throb at the back of her head. It aches, but she pushes it away, and allows adrenaline to pull her forward. 

A mystery, and a psychic trail to boot. Probably has to do with the blast of psychic energy that threw the woman’s death into her head. It’s all coming together now, she can feel it, like puzzle pieces laid out and just waiting to be connected. Never mind that she’s too fuzzy to properly piece them all in her head. She just needs one more clue, or a burst of inspiration, and it will all become clear.

In the meantime, rain soaks her hair and blue-turned-black seeps into her vision as the nighttime falls. They tramp through puddles and slowly darkening streets, cast shadows across puddled street lights, and turn down corners she never would have gone for if not for the sonic. Behind her, as they continue, she can hear the slow mutterings of her fam, and takes pains to toss out the occasional encouraging word or phrase.

They die on her lips when the sonic finally stops them short, and she lowers it to stare blankly at a half-constructed flat block, the skeletal buildings looming ghostly in the darkness.

“This is where you clue went?” Even Yaz sounds disbelieving this time. The Doctor doesn’t answer her. It looks demolished, she thinks absently, though she knows that it’s only in the process of being build. Halfway through creation, and soon it will be brand new, towering above the street they stand on.

Strange, she thinks, that the newness only begins when the construction is complete. Now, the raw materials, the skeletons of what to come stand before them, but they don’t particularly mean anything. They’re declothed, and someday, she thinks, when all this history is said and done, they’ll only be skeletons again, looming large against the smoke of a burning sky.

She blinks, and smoke waters her eyes. Her boots are full of sand.

“Doctor?” Ryan steps up beside her, and when she doesn’t respond, gives her the smallest of nudges. Just enough to draw her attention, barely enough to feel. “Is there something here, you think?”

The Doctor stares. She wants to gag for the smell on the air—like a bonfire, only it’s not the fifth of November. By rights, no ash should lie here. In the back of her head, a single beat drums painfully, and it occurs to her that it sounds like the beat of a heart. Not her own, certainly, but a psychic echo, tossed back from a murder that won’t happen if she can prevent it.

“Doctor,” Ryan repeats softly, and this time he’s looking at her, worried. “Are you okay?”

The Doctor blinks, and steps back. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah.” She blinks again, and the half-built flat block is a cavernous ruin, the Citadel crumbling in the distance. She can’t do this, she thinks. Not now. Not in the cold, in the dark. “I think we should come back tomorrow. When we have the light to search.”

“What?” Ryan balks, more out of surprise than anything. “But I thought—”

“Tomorrow.” And with that she turns on her heel and stalks off, the memories fading behind her, the ash billowing up in her footprints.

She doesn’t look, but she knows that they follow.


	4. the trilling wire in the blood, sings below inveterate scars, appeasing long-forgotten wars

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> no editing once again

They make their way back to Graham’s house, and the Doctor doesn’t lead. She doesn’t have the energy for it. Night, and the sight of that desolate construction site have sucked it out of her, and so she trails behind, empty and aching with a feeling she can’t name. It borders on grief, but it’s too stale to resemble the new, sharp kind that her home planet has wrought upon her.

Always new grief, she thinks with a hint of bitter irony. Even in utter destruction, her home will find a way to hurt her. She almost wishes she didn’t care.

Night has turned the rain invisible by the time they reach Graham’s home, but it splatters down loudly anyway, and by the time they tramp through the door, they’re all thoroughly soaked.

“Some hunt,” Ryan says as he peels off soaking shoes and socks. He glances to Yaz, then to the Doctor. “Suppose you’re staying with us?”

Ya shrugs, and her eyes dart to the Doctor, lingering only for a moment, before returning to Ryan. “Think so, yeah. My flat’s a bit of a walk from here.”

Ryan frowns. “But it’s just across—”

“In the rain,” Yaz clarifies loudly, and Ryan pauses, then nods as if this makes sense.

“Oh. Yeah.” He glances to the stairs, then to Graham. “What do you say, grandad? Guest bedroom?”

“Lucky we have one,” Graham grumbles, but then he shoots Yaz a weary grin. “We’ll get it made up for you. Or maybe—” He hesitates, and his eyes move to the Doctor. “Did you want—?”

“Sofa,” the Doctor says immediately, and ignores Yaz’s slightly insulted look. She’ll have to make do. She’s exhausted, swaying on her feet, but she can’t quite summon up the wherewithal to close her eyes. Who knows what she’ll see behind them? “I’ll take the couch. Let Yaz have the bed.”

“I really don’t—” Yaz starts, but falls silent at Graham’s look. Something passes between them, and the Doctor can’t tell what it is. She’s never been good at that, interpreting the little glances and sidelong eyes. Humans have a knack for it that she doesn’t, and despite her years and years going native, she’s never managed to quite master the turn of it. 

Probably, she’s insulted them. Oh well. She’ll just pencil it into her growing list of apologies. There’s plenty of room, seeing as some of the victims aren’t around anymore to receive their due.

“Doctor. Are you listening?”

“Huh?” The Doctor jerks out of her thoughts, and realizes too late that she’s drifted off again, sliding down some memory tangent. She focuses on Ryan, who swims bluely before her very eyes. “Sorry, what?”

“I was saying, did you want us to make up the sofa for you?” He gestures to the front room, where it sits stolidly. It’s bare, except for a couple of cushions. “Or at least grab you a blanket. And you should probably get some pajamas, because your clothes are—”

“I’m fine,” the Doctor says instinctively, only to realize that it’s not the right answer. Or at least, not the polite answer. And sure enough, he stops, nose wrinkling, frown forming. “I mean—just a blanket. And I don’t need any other clothes, thanks. Might take my coat off, though.”

He’s still staring at her, mouth opening as if he’s about to say something. Before he can, she turns and shrugs off her coat, hanging it on the nearby coat rack. “There we go. Much better. Now, bed?”

“Uh—” Slowly, he shuts his mouth. He doesn’t look entirely pleased. “Yeah, sure. Just give me a minute to grab you a blanket.”

She waves a hand at him, _take your time_ , and he exchanges a look with Graham that she can’t decipher before moving off. They’ve been doing that a lot lately, she think dimly, but she’s too tired to parse the implications. She just needs to sit down for a moment. Sleep is an unlikely possibility, but just to rest her head—

At the least, it might chase some of the dizziness away.

Ryan returns a moment later with a blanket, which he places in her arms before turning to Yaz. “C’mon, we can show you the guest room.”

“Sure.” Yaz nods gratefully, and glances one last time at the Doctor before moving off. “Night, Doctor. See you in the morning, yeah?”

“Bright and early,” the Doctor calls to their retreating backs, and only catches Graham’s grumble. She watches them as the troop up the stairs, together and not looking back, and feels something strange flutter in her chest. Not loneliness—she’s been around that block often enough to have the measure of it. Something different, but no less unpleasant. It sits in her chest, heavy and uncomfortable, and lingers when they at last disappear at the top of the stairs.

Exclusion, she thinks, and stomach jolts. She wonders if it’s a fair thought, and then decides it doesn’t matter. Humans are hardly fair about these things, anyway.

The sofa is barer than she’d expected, and the cushions offer little comfort. She almost wishes, as she settles onto the scratchy material, the wool blanket pulled over her wet clothing, that she’d taken the offer of pajamas. Then, she’s not sure she can bear the thought of changing her clothes, not when everything is changing around her. Even now, lying on the sofa, the darkness plain and obstinately normal, she can’t help but taste a thin layer of facsimile, like dust settling on a magazine. Something is off, she can feel it. She just can’t pinpoint it.

It takes a few solid minutes for the fam to settle upstairs. She listens to their footsteps, their soft mutterings and tired conversation, and winces when, at last, the upstairs light flickers out, plunging the entire house into darkness. In the silence, rain patters upon the rooftop, and cold seeps through the window at her back. She pulls her blanket tighter, and debates closing her eyes. Which is worse—the darkness that lurks behind her closed eyelids, or that which lurks in the shadows around her? She can’t decide. 

She keeps them open.

In the darkness, bulky shapes loom. The rain falls loudly, and occasionally, gusts of wind send the entire house rattling. In the noise, it’s impossible to drift off. She stays awake, despite the exhaustion that drags at her, and listens listlessly to the dull thudding at the base of her skull— a single heartbeat, heavy and painful, thump-thump-thumping against her brain. She can’t help but wonder if it’s trying to tell her something. Or maybe it’s just a timer, a lingering vestige of the woman’s death, ticking down to the Doctor’s imminent failure.

Because she’s lying on a sofa, scared off by the dark and a few paltry memories, pretending she’s about to sleep when she knows that she won’t. There’s a woman out there on the cusp of death, and a trail of psychic energy going cold. She’s staring at a ceiling, and in-between the rain and the thud of a heart not her own, she can almost imagine screams.

With a huff, the Doctor turns on her side, yanks the cushion out from under her head, and shoves it over her ears. It does nothing. Even the rain penetrates, lashing down with the intensity of a late winter storm. Chill is seeping through the window. She’s shivering, despite the wool blanket.

Sleep is evasive. She’ll never catch up. She stares at the dark shape of a chair, Graham’s front room replacement, then heaves a heavy sigh and drags herself into a sitting position, the blanket falling from her shoulders.

No sound from upstairs. The entire house signs with sleepy quiet. Only the rain, and her own psyche, eats at her. She stares blankly in the dark for a long moment, seesawing between guilt and impatience, then slowly stands, and tiptoes to the coat rack.

The sonic is in her pocket, dry as bone, thanks to some forward-thinking waterproof pockets. She pulls it out, and turns the idea over in her head, arguing for every inch. It’s only to check, she allows herself. Scan the house for psychic energy. Less to accomplish anything, and more to put her brains to rest, because she can’t bloody sleep. 

She won’t find anything, but—

The sonic dings on the first pass. She stares at it, wallowing in dull surprise, then brings it to her nose, straining to make out the readings.

Her mouth drops open, and hangs. She gapes, blankly, then snaps her jaw shut and peers closer.

The psychic trail is inside the house. It spills into the front room, pools in the hallway, and finally, slides out under the front door. From the sole reading she took, she can tell that it stretches off into the distance, though to where, she has no idea. 

Following them, she realizes, but that doesn’t make sense. If it were following them, whatever the creator of this psychic energy happens to be, then how could they be following it? They had followed the psychic energy to the construction site, hadn’t they?

When, the Doctor thinks with a chill, had the follower become the followed?

There’s one way to find out. If the psychic energy leads back to the construction site, they same way that they had came, then she’ll know it’s an old trail. If it leads somewhere else, it’ll be coincidence. Pure, reassuring coincidence.

She doesn’t believe in coincidence, but here, in the chilly darkness, with her fam slumbering upstairs, she almost wants to.

She’s grabbing her coat before she’s even really made the decision, wincing at the damp as she pulls it on sleeve by sleeve. She won’t go far, she promises herself. Just a few steps out of the house to ascertain that the trail is not what she thinks. If it’s an old trail, she’ll double back and scan the house, wake the fam and see if she can put up protections. There’s no active psychic presence there currently—she would have felt it—but who knows? It could return at any time.

She winces as the rain hits her back, and stops to put her hood up before descending the steps, sonic raised high as she goes. Three steps in, and relief floods her; the psychic trail doesn’t lead back to the construction site. She waves it high and low just to be sure, and instead picks it up in the opposite direction, heading down the street to the left. 

To the left. Into town, she recalls dimly, and then wonders how she knows that. Had she visited Sheffield that often?

Whatever the case, the trail is new, which means that whatever passed through the house either returned to town, or came from it. As had the original trail, she recalls suddenly. If they both lead to the town—if the strange things she’d seen had truly happened—

She doesn’t pause. She doesn’t think twice. She sets off down the street, smack dab in the middle, cutting through puddles of yellow light cast by the street lamps. The rain has dissolved into a fine, soaking mist, but she barely feels it. Her eyes are on her sonic, and more distantly, on the street ahead.

She’ll only check, she promises, though her promises are slipping through her fingers like a kid trying to scoop a goldfish out of the bowl. It’s a midnight walk, more than anything. A stroll through the wet, windy Sheffield night.

Even she doesn’t believe herself, but that’s not new.

The center of town is farther than she’d thought, so far that she soon realizes she’s not entirely sure how to return to Graham’s. Not that it matters. She’ll pick up her TARDIS on the way—assuming she remembers the street she left her on—towel dry, and pop back just as the sun comes up. Hopefully with more findings, and maybe then the fam won’t look at her like this entire investigation is a fool’s errand.

It’s hard to be convincing, she reflects, when the only evidence is inside her head.

So focused is she on the sonic, and on the dark steps ahead of her, that she barely notices when the trail changes. It slows, then pools widely, and when she looks up, she’s standing in a car park. There are four vehicles present—she counts them—and bright yellow light streams down from the heavy-duty lamps mounted high above her head.

In front of her face, the glass doors to the Tesco gleam proudly.

The Doctor stares. Slowly, she lowers her sonic. Then she squints, and steps closer.

Inside, she can make out a couple of cashiers, leaning wearily over their tills. The lights inside are bright, and turn the whole place out hollow, like the inside of an empty beehive, the shelves serving as honeycomb. It was eerie before, in that bland human way, and now, in the middle of the night, it’s even more so.

It’s also, inexplicably, open.

Th Doctor takes a step forward, and then another. A third brings her within distance of the sliding glass doors, which part readily, and then she steps inside, peering dazedly at the cashiers. None of them look up. The closest fiddles idly with his nametag, gleaming silver against his red vest.

Psychic energy snags around her feet, and draws her forward. She walks as if in a dream, right past the cashier, who ignores her in turn.

She’s not sure where to go, so she wanders, first down the bread aisle, then down the frozen foods. Another turn takes her into produce, and she stares blankly at the rows of greenery, watching automatic systems spray fine mist over lettuce and celery.

“Can I help you?”

The Doctor starts. Then she turns, and blinks at Jillian, who, despite the late hour, has a perfect customer service smile stretched across her face.

“Jillian,” she says hoarsely, and her eyes flick down to her nametag, only to remember that it doesn’t exist. No vest, no nametag, nothing but a smile to remind her that she’s not a customer. “Shouldn’t you be closed?”

Jillian’s smile turns kinder, more familiar. “Open until midnight, dear. Were you looking for something? Only you seemed a bit lost.”

“Do I?” Then the Doctor shakes her head. “No—hang on. I think there’s something wrong with your shop.”

Jillian’s smile crinkles into a confused frown. “Is something missing off the shelves? I’m sorry, but we’ve had a bit of a rush lately, thanks to the situation, and—”

“No, no.” The Doctor shakes her head again, wide enough to send droplets flying, then drags a hand roughly through her hair to steady herself. Blue edges at her vision, warring with the artificial brilliance of the fluorescent lights. “I mean, I’ve been picking up psychic energy, and I think—I think—”

“Dear.” Jillian reaches out and snags her firmly by the sleeve, leading her to a stand of mangoes. “Hold on to this for a second. You look like you’re about to pass out.”

“I’m fine” the Doctor says, which isn’t true at all, and licks her lips, trying to find the words that were so close before. Her head aches, and her fingers have gone numb with the chill. Despite the earlier warmth of the shop, everything has gone quite cold. “Listen, Jillian—”

She doesn’t realize she’s sagging until she reaches out to grab the stand, and winds up with a mango instead. Dimly, she stares at it, and wonders why it’s swaying, only to realize that she might be the one doing the swaying. And sure enough, Jillian’s hand comes out to steady her.

“Oh, you’re just like my son.” She clucks her tongue, and, with a surprising amount of strength, pulls her into a somewhat upright position. “All of nine years old, and he won’t even cry if he scrapes his knee. He’d be on death door, and he’ll pretend he’s just under the weather.”

“Sounds like he has the right idea,” the Doctor slurs, and watches as Jillian shakes her head in disapproval.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She sounds like a mum, the Doctor thinks dizzily, and then recalls that she is a mum. “There’s nothing wrong with a bit of a cry. Or having a sit-down. You look like you could use one.”

“Maybe,” the Doctor admits, “but I don’t have time. You see—”

And then she frowns, because something is tingling at the back of her neck. The chill maybe, or—

She blinks, and the world wavers. The next thing she knows, she’s sliding to the ground, Jillian’s hand tugging uselessly at her sleeve. The mango, too-green, is still clenched in her fist, her nails digging into the tough skin. 

“Oh dear—” Jillian squats down beside her, worry shimmering in her eyes, and the Doctor tries to summon up a word to dissuade it, but can’t seem to think of any. Instead, she sags against the mango stand, and tilts her head back until her crown touches the side. From this angle, she can just barely make out a cashier at his till, running a scanner mindlessly over some item. Beyond him, the sky hangs a dull gray, threatening rain.

Gray. The Doctor frowns. Hadn’t it been black a moment before? She struggles for some inkling of time passed inside the shop, and can’t seem to put a sum on it. It might have been hours. It could have been minutes.

A hand passes over her vision, and a moment later, Jillian’s concerned face looms large.

“Can you see me?” The Doctor nods and she draws her hand back, then squats on her heels and purses her lips. “You just—fell to the ground. I wasn’t sure what to do. Maybe we should get you an—”

“No ambulance.” The Doctor reaches out, groping for purchase, and finds it on the mango stand. With a hand from Jillian that she doesn’t refuse, she manages to haul herself to her feet, then swivels unsteadily and frowns at the large front windows.

“Jillian,” she says hoarsely, “what time is it?”

“About six.” Jillian comes up beside her, frowning at the window. “Looks like rain, doesn’t it? We’ve had such awful storms, just on top of everything—”

“I need—to go,” the Doctor forces out, and steps forward, heedless of Jillian’s cry behind her.

“But just a minute ago you were—”

“I’m fine,” the Doctor calls back without turning her head, and forces herself to stay steady, pressing past the ache in her head and the dizziness that weaves at the edge of her vision. She makes it past the cashier, and half expects Jillian to follow, but nobody does. The sky outside is a solid gray, low and ominous above her head. It’s only when she steps outside, cringing against the chill, does she realize that she’s still holding the mango. She stares at it, then sticks it in her pocket and continues forward.

She doesn’t know where to go, so she wanders toward a street she vaguely recognizes, boots scraping through thin, oily puddles, her sonic in her hand. It takes her fifteen minutes to realize she hasn’t even been scanning. Only walking, no destination in mind, brain as empty as a drained sink.

Drained. Empty. So are the streets, she realizes, empty as a half-decorated, no cars on the street and nearly no people about. She walks down one street, doesn’t see a single soul, walks down another and meets the same, and it’s only on the third street when she turns and catches the tail end of a door swinging shut. She follows without thinking, down the street and in through the entrance, and doesn’t realize until she enters that she’s in the same cafe from before.

It’s almost empty, and something else as well. The furniture is faded, the walls tinged with blueish gray. Behind the counter, a bored barista prepares a drink, and, at a table near the door, two men argue over something in a newspaper. Their voices carry as the Doctor moves around them, loud and abrasive and oddly misplaced.

“And I’m telling you, it’s no use! They’ll involve us either way, we’re only a level five planet—”

“Yeah, and who gave us that distinction? The Shadow Proclamation, and they didn’t even bother to ask—”

“As if it matters! Listen, they’ll be using us for bullets against the Nightmare Child whether the government agrees to it or not, you mark my words—”

The Doctor pauses, her blood running cold in her chest. Her hearts thump loudly, drowning out the ache at the base of her skull. She nearly turns around.

But there’s someone else sitting in the corner booth, the sole other occupant of the cafe, and when the Doctor’s eyes pass over her, she looks up. Their gazes connect, and like a fish on a line, the Doctor is reeled forward, the arguing of the two men fading into background noise.

She reaches the booth and settles in, then cranes over to peer at the newspaper. TIME WAR REACHES EARTH is splattered across the page in all capitals. The Doctor reads it, then looks up. Yaz is watching her with cold eyes.

“Wrong timeline,” she says. Her throat is dry. Yaz shrugs, then reaches out and, with two fingers, draws the newspaper towards her. She picks it up and folds it out, propping it against the edge of the table.

“They’re using Earth as bullets,” she says. There’s no blame in her voice, but the Doctor feels it anyway, scalding. “Thought you would stop it.”

“I did,” she says, but that’s a lie and they both know it. She’s not sure why she says it. In one timeline, maybe, she did, but in other, endless timelines, Earth was ripped apart again and again. Sometimes, the Doctor did it herself. 

Yaz shakes her head, and replaces the newspaper on the table. Then she reaches for her coffee and draws it close, though she doesn’t take a sip. The liquid within is black as pitch and just as thick. No steam curls off the top. “Are you okay, Doctor?”

“Yes,” the Doctor says, and she’s not sure if it’s a lie. Sometimes, she believes it. Fake it until you make it, as the old Earth saying goes. Sometimes, she thinks she lies just to break apart the truth, so it’ll all come spilling forward. 

Yaz looks up at her then, and her skin is gray as ash, her eyes black as coal. She’s not alive, the Doctor knows immediately, and even her timeline is starting to fray, bits dropping off like dead leaves. 

There’s someone in her eyes, but it’s not her. Not her at all.

“You’re not home anymore,” she says, and her lips move dryly, skin cracking like stiff paper. “In fact, you’re very far away. What are you looking for, Doctor? What are you getting out of this?”

It would be nice, the Doctor thinks, if she had some inkling as to what might be happening. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not even sure—”

She glances around, back to the two men, who are arguing louder and louder, their voices rough with fear— “I think I’m going insane. Or something is happening to me. I think—”

“I think, I think, I think.” Yaz mocks her, tilting her head to the side. “So worried about yourself you’re not even looking. Don’t you know the world has ended? You could be helping us. You _should_ be helping us.”

“I am,” the Doctor says desperately, and leans forward, her nails scrabbling across the table. “Yaz—I’m trying to fix this. Whatever’s wrong with Sheffield—it has to be affecting me too. That’s why I keep seeing these—these things, and why—”

But Yaz is shaking her head, disappointed. “You don’t understand,” she growls, frustration seeping through. “You ran so far from home and now—now you won’t even _look_ at us.”

“I am looking,” the Doctor says, but Yaz is still shaking her head back and forth. “I swear, Yaz, I’ve been looking this whole time, I just need—I need—”

But Yaz leans back, awful horror dawning upon her face. Her timeline is shedding like skin, faster and faster. “You aren’t even listening,” she whispers. “You aren’t even listening.”

“I _am_ ,” the Doctor insists, but she can’t even hear her own voice anymore. The arguing behind her is growing in volume, voices so high-pitched in fear she can’t even understand the words, louder and louder until it drowns out her pleas, her very thoughts.

“Yaz—” she tries, and reaches out, but Yaz is splitting and falling apart, and so too is the table beneath her hands, the floor beneath her feet, the entire cafe spiraling into a possibility that doesn’t exist, and she jumps up in a panic, reaching out desperately for a thread to tie it all together—

It’s too late. The possibility slips from her grasp and the world slides away, crumbling into temporal dust, and the Doctor opens her mouth, either to beg or scream, but she doesn’t get the chance. She’s gone in a moment, twisted into nonexistence.

She wakes up with a start, hearts pounding, sweat running freely down her brow. Her hands are shaking, her whole body numbed into panic. It takes her a moment to realize where she is.

“Just in time for breakfast,” Yaz remarks by the kitchen table. She’s still in pajamas—borrowed from Ryan, by the looks of things—and she shoots the Doctor a smile as she sets out spoons and cups. “You slept a while, Doctor.”

The Doctor stares, her hearts thrumming slowly. From the kitchen, she can hear the distant sounds of Ryan and Graham preparing what smells like the aforementioned breakfast. She heaves a heavy breath, forcing herself to calm, then looks around in a daze. Through the windy, a gray, cloudy day glimmers. She studies the sky for a long moment, then turns. On the floor, her coat lies crumpled, and she leans over to snag it from the carpet, drawing it into her lap. It’s still damp, remarkably so, and she grimaces as she reaches into her pocket, rummaging for her sonic screwdriver.

Her fingers brush something hard and smooth instead. She frowns, then pulls the object out, and turns it over in her hands. It takes her a moment to process what she’s holding.

In her hands, heavy and tough, is a green mango.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope the thing about the trail made sense? she assumes, bc it wasnt leading from where they came from before, that whatever it is isnt following them. also it will hoepfully make more sense later maybe or not bc what am i even doing


	5. both a new world, and the old, made explicit

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello i had a tough time with this chapter but I think things are coming together! we should have maybe three chapters left, this isn't meant to be a super long story
> 
> to everybody who kudosed and commented: you are amazing and i would die 4 u

“Doctor, are you coming?”

The Doctor takes a moment to raise her head. When she does, it’s to find Graham and Ryan setting down plates of food, as Yaz waits by a pulled out chair, watching her.

“We weren’t sure if you were hungry, but we set four places,” she says. The Doctor only stares. Deep in her chest, suspicion stirs. She looks at the mango, then back to Yaz.

“Am I dreaming?”

Yaz’s uncertain look drops into a frown. “No,” she says, “but—” her eyes roam over the Doctor’s face, and her frown deepens— “you do look kind of sick, if you’re asking.”

“Yeah, Doc, you don’t look much better than the night before.” Graham moves around the table, lips set unhappily. “Did you get enough sleep?”

Worrying. Mothering. Stifling. They have to be real. She drops her gaze to the mango, and frowns. Something is escaping her. Something important, that she has to—

“The murder.” Recollection jolts through her, and immediately she’s on her feet, blanket thrown in her hurry. “We have to—”

“Hang on.” Ryan steps forward, hands out though he’s half a room away. “We just set down break—”

“No time,” the Doctor gasps, and blinks, because she could have sworn the floor was farther away. Then she realizes that she’s crumpling right towards it, and with no time to break her fall. She flings out a hand, and it’s useless.

Yaz is less so. She catches the Doctor just before she hits, and manages to ease them both gracelessly to the floor. The Doctor sinks for a moment, all the fight gone out of her, then blinks hard and struggles away.

“Sorry,” she forces out, the word an effort. The word is spinning like a dangerous carnival ride. When had the world started spinning? Some bloody vertigo, she thinks grimly. “Just had a wobble. I need to—”

She makes it to her feet, followed moments later by Yaz, who shoots her a mutinous look.

“You’re welcome,” she mumbles, but the Doctor doesn’t reply. She’s too busy searching her pockets, switching out the mango for something more suitable. 

“We haven’t got time,” she tells them, and in her mind’s eye, a newspaper swims, the headline bleak. “One night was too long, we should have been up at—”

“Hold on, hold on!” Graham steps forward, hands raised as if to calm. “Doc, you needed the sleep. You still need the sleep. You look like you’re about to pass out any moment, and—”

“And somebody is going to die.” She looks up and pins him with the kind of gaze that most humans quail under. Steely determination, and a hint of shame. Usually, it takes about three seconds for them to fold.

Graham O’Brien doesn’t fold. He eyes her, then curls his lip in a way that tells her he’s not playing. “Don’t try that with me, Doc,” he says quietly. “We’re your friends. You could stop and get some food into you.”

“I—” She stares at him, and realizes distantly that she might be trembling. From the chill, or something else, she’s not sure. The dizziness hasn’t entirely receded; eerie blue glimmers at the edge of her perception. 

“I just have a cold,” she says. Graham raises an eyebrow, and she opens her mouth to argue, only to realize she doesn’t have to; something wet is touching her upper lip. She reaches up to dab it, and can’t help a small, victorious grin. “See? Runny nose. The common cold.”

Which would account for the dizziness, and even, she’s pretty sure, the wild dreams. The mango in her pocket is likely a hallucination; it’ll be gone the next time she looks.

But Yaz, Ryan and Graham are staring at her, disbelief etched across their faces, and it’s Ryan who, after a long moment, snorts and shakes his head.

“That’s not a runny nose, mate. You’re bleeding.”

“I—what?” She brings her hand away from her face, and holds her fingers out in front of her. Sure enough, orangeish red stains the pads. She stares at it until her fingers tremble, then slowly lowers them. 

“Oh,” she says dimly, “oh.”

“Oh?” Yaz asks. “That’s all you’re going to say? Doctor—” 

She steps forward, and without thinking the Doctor steps back. “Don’t,” she says quickly, and plunges her hand in her pocket, rummaging for a handkerchief. She finds one and yanks it out, then plugs up her nose, as the fam stare on in varying stages of disbelief and disgust. 

“I’m fine,” she tells them for what might be the dozenth time, and knows immediately that they don’t believe it. “Really, this is fine. This makes sense. All of this is making sense.”

“Does it?” Ryan asks, one eyebrow raised. “Because it sure doesn’t seem like it.”

“It does,” the Doctor insists, though she can tell it’s nearly a losing battle. With her nose plugged up, her head feels so clogged she can barely breathe. She’s not even sure she’s telling the truth. Pieces are falling into place, sluggishly, and she can barely marshal her thoughts to puzzle them together.

The nose bleed. Something about her nose bleeding, and the mango in her pocket. Physical evidence of something that, by all rights, shouldn’t have happened. Time changing around her, and a world that doesn’t make sense. Psychic interference splattered all over the place, stewing together into a mess of—

“Temporal disregulation,” she breathes, and realization strikes her so hard her knees buckle. This time, Yaz doesn’t rush forward, but when the Doctor wobbles and reaches out without thinking, she doesn’t step away.

“Temporal—what?” It’s Graham who pipes up, confusion writ across his face. “Doc, you’re still not making sense.”

“No, but I am,” she tells them, and then recalls that they’re only human. Humans, with a limited understanding of the time-space continuum. “This town is being affected by heavy psychic energy, strong enough to disturb reality. Things out of place, time that doesn’t make sense. And—” she wrinkles her nose, and touches one finger to her lip, fingernail scraping at the now-dried blood— “it’s giving me a nose bleed.”

“Psychic energy?” Ryan asks. “You mean like—seeing the future?”

The Doctor shakes her head. “No, no.” She’s still sagging, leaning heavily on Yaz’s shoulder, who doesn’t look too happy about the whole situation. “I mean, seeing the future is one example of psychic abilities. But when I talk about psychic energy in the general sense, I’m talking about the ability of the mind to affect the physical world. It happens more frequently than you might think.”

“Sure,” Graham says, “except that doesn’t make sense either. Are you telling me a psychic can affect time?”

“Lots of things can affect time.” The Doctor winces and, with one heave, manages to push herself off of Yaz. She’d assumed it would help, but Yaz only looks vaguely insulted. She really can’t win, can she? “Like gravity. Gravity affects time. So does psychic energy, if it’s strong enough. How do you think Time Lords manipulate time?”

“You can manipulate—”

“Only when I want to.” The Doctor waves her hand, then swipes her sleeve across her lip, drawing a stain. “And that’s not important. I mean, it could be, if we could just find the _source_.” She grimaces. “Then I might be able to put a stop to whatever’s going to happen.”

“You mean the murder?” Yaz asks. She’s eying the Doctor’s sleeve with slight disgust.

“Exactly.” The Doctor nods, knees wobbling slightly with the movement. It’s the psychic energy, she thinks dimly, or maybe the temporal disregulation—or both. She would be right as rain, if it weren’t for everything that’s happening. 

Which is why she needs to figure out the murder, and quick. Because somehow, someway, she’s certain it’s the heart of the problem. Everything revolves around it.

And if she could figure it out—

“That’s why we have to keep going,” she says, and spins on her heel, handkerchief still hanging from her nose, blood trailing down her sleeve. “We figure that out, we’ll figure everything out, I’m sure of it. Or at least I will. C’mon.”

“Wait—but—” She’s already at the door by the time Yaz catches up with her, grabbing her by the unbloodied sleeve. “Doctor, wait! We just set for breakfast, and you’re still—”

“I’m not _sick!_ ” She turns around, so quickly that Yaz darts back in surprise. The movement sends her own head spinning as well, and she stops, blinking. For a moment, then world swims, then snaps back into focus. Yaz is peering at her worriedly. 

“I’m not,” she repeats, just to make sure it’s true. “It’s—whatever is wrong here is affecting me. That’s why we have to figure this out. That’s how I’ll feel better.”

She thinks. No, she’s sure of it. But Yaz wavers, still uncertain, as Graham and Ryan trail into the hallway behind her.

“Are you sure about that, cockle?” Graham says quietly. “Because if you go tramping out through that weather, looking like that—”

“I’m sure,” she snaps, too mean, _too mean_. Quickly, she reels it back in, forces her tone to soften. “I promise. And I wouldn’t lie to you.”

A lie in itself, and it’s almost hysterically funny. She’s too far gone to laugh, but mirth rises up in her throat anyway, bitter and sharp. She swallows it, and sticks a neutral expression on her face instead, something akin to earnest honesty. She thinks. She’s not even sure she’s in control of her facial expressions anymore, never mind her thoughts, or even reality. It’s all spinning out of her control like a leaf on the wind, spiraling towards a ground she can’t see through the clouds.

They don’t answer. Graham shifts uncomfortably, and glances to Ryan, who flattens his lips and doesn’t say anything. Yaz watches her, something terribly knowing in her eyes. Sympathy as well, and that hurts too.

They don’t believe her, she thinks, and something drops in her stomach. All that trust, and she’s squandered it on—what? She can’t recall.

“Alright.” Graham delivers the word into the silence with such finality that she knows he’s speaking for everyone, though neither of the other two look happy about it. “We trust you, Doc. Just—let’s get this done quick, yeah?”

His eyes roam over her, worry glimmering steadily, but she ignores it for the relief in her stomach. The world, sliding out from beneath her feet, pauses. Sure footing, just for a moment.

She can do this, she thinks. Solve the murder, and the fam will know that she’s fine, that she’s right as usual, and she has a lid on things. She always has a lid on things. Even when her nose is bleeding and her head’s in a tizzy.

It’ll take more than a little psychic energy, she thinks grimly, to bring her to her knees.

“Good.” Her eyes move between the three of them, and then she forces a grin, so stiff it cracks at the edges. “Brilliant, actually. Shall we?”

It’s Ryan who answers this time. He’s watching her steadily, a hint of suspicion, his hands balled deep into his pockets. “Sure. Are we going back to the construction site?”

“Uh—” She hesitates. Truth is, she doesn’t want to. The memory of it looms large in her mind’s eye, ghostly and reminiscent of something she’s not sure she can bear to face in front of the fam, not even in the daylight. 

Besides, there are other trails, aren’t there? Psychic energy, circulating through the center of town. Concentrating in a Tesco, of all places.

“No,” she decides. “I picked up another trail last—well, I did a quick scan of the house before I went to sleep. Found another trail leading into town. Didn’t follow it, but—” she hesitates, wonders if they can see through her lie. They’re watching her too intently, like she’s about to fall over. Like she’s about to trip up. “—it’s worth following, anyway.”

“Sure,” Yaz says. “I mean, you have the lead.” She gestures awkwardly towards the door. “Shall we?”

Outside the world is a watery blue, the rain laying a fine mist over everything. Fog hangs low on the street, bunches over trees in the distance. A grim day to be out and about, and the Doctor can tell that the others are thinking the same. They’ve all grabbed coats this time, but still, they shiver as they turn down the street, the Doctor leading, with her sonic out in front. 

“You’d think the weather might let up.” Graham cranes his neck back, and frowns as rain collects on his own. Beside him, Ryan snorts.

“You live in England, grandad. Ought to be used to it more than any of us.”

“Alright, alright.” Graham lowers his head, frown deepening. “I didn’t say I wasn’t used to it. Just saying, it’s nearly spring, that’s all. Doesn’t have to be so cold.”

“Doesn’t have to be rarely means much, Graham,” the Doctor calls back as she tramps ahead, squinting through fog. The trail is different now, and it’s throwing her off. It’s leading the same way, to be sure, but with slight differences. The far side of the street, rather than the side she’d walked the night before. Going around a rubbish bin she can’t recall seeing.

It’s almost as if somebody has retraced their steps. 

“Do you know where we’re going?”

The Doctor starts, and nearly drops her sonic. Yaz winces in apology.

“Sorry.” Her voice is quiet, like she doesn’t want to be heard. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“You didn’t,” the Doctor says, too harsh again, and inwardly groans. Where’s a little leeway when she needs it? She shouldn’t have to sit through so many interrogations. It’s nearly immoral. “How are you, Yaz?”

“Good,” Yaz answers. Her eyes are on the Doctor, who refuses to meet them. No point, because she knows what she’ll see. It’s an in to sympathy, a gateway to a conversation she doesn’t want to have. “How are you?”

Don’t react. Don’t react. She repeats the phrase in her head, lips pressed flat together. It takes her a moment to answer.

“Fine,” she says. “Just a little wobbly, that’s all. Need to figure this out, and then I’ll be perfectly alright.”

“Because of the psychic energy?” Yaz asks, and the Doctor nods.

“Time Lords are powerful psychics,” she explains through gritted teeth. The mist is collecting on her eyeballs, or at least, so it feels. The entire world lost in a haze of blueish fog. “Whatever’s affecting Sheffield—whatever is going to kill that woman, I’m guessing—is affecting me too. That’s why I’m a bit wobbly. But it’s fine. Just a bit of a head wonk.”

“Sure.” Yaz bites her lip, still eying her. “Only you seem really out of it, Doctor. If you don’t mind me saying—”

“I do, actually—”

“—it’s like you’re not all there.” She finishes, frowning. “You keep going off on your own, or into your own head, or something. Like you’re seeing things we aren’t.”

“Am I?” the Doctor wonders, only to realize too late that she’d voice the thought instead. “I mean—” she grimaces— “that’s what it means to be psychically attuned, Yaz. Sometimes you pick up on things others wouldn’t.”

“Like what?” Yaz asks.

_Like walking into a timeline that doesn’t exist. Like having a dream that leaves a mango in your pocket. Like watching the world dissolve beneath your feet._

“Sometimes,” the Doctor begins carefully, “Psychic energy becomes powerful enough to manifest things physically. That’s what I was explaining earlier, about the connection with time. That’s how you get things like ghosts, or poltergeists.”

“Ghosts?” Yaz frowns. “But how—”

The Doctor waves a dismissive hand. “Oh, think about it. What’s a ghost, but a temporal echo? A psychic trace that jars free of time, and decides to stick around. Nasty little things, honestly. Feed off attention. You know how you get those loons going on about a ghost in every house they visit? That’s because they’re looking, and leaving their psychic energy open, and there’s nothing a temporal echo likes more.”

“So you think that’s what this is?” Yaz asks as they turn down a street. The Doctor barely notices. The sky is a solid mass of gray, pressing down on the base of her skull. Too much pressure to think. Her head is aching, stronger than before. “You think it’s a ghost?”

“Do I?” The Doctor frowns, considering. “It could be. But ghost from where? It’d have to be a particularly vengeful death to inspire this sort of reaction.”

“Well, isn’t that what we’re looking for?” Yaz says quietly. “A vengeful death?”

The Doctor nearly stops where she stands. “Oh,” she says, brain working, knitting the theory together— “oh, no, but that doesn’t—”

“Doctor, did you want to go in?” Ryan’s voice sounds behind her, jerking the Doctor out of her almost-realization. She whips around, startled, then hurries to collect herself.

“Go in where?” she says. Ryan, eyebrow raised, silently gestures over her shoulder.

“Didn’t know you needed food shopping, Doc,” Graham remarks, and she stares at him. Then, slowly, she turns around. 

Tesco gleams proudly in the early morning drizzle, lighted windows shining through the gloom. Within, she can see the cashiers at work, slowly moving through lines of items. Despite their work, there’s only a couple customers.

“Oh,” she repeats softly, though she’s not sure why. Revelation is hanging right in front of her, and she can’t see it. “Didn’t even notice.”

“We were talking,” Yaz explains to the boys as the Doctor simply stares, brow creased. Distantly, she watches the cashiers move sluggishly, their red vests a splash of color through the windows.

And then it hits, revelation crashing like a brick through a glass window.

“Oh,” she gasps, and lunges forward without warning, without even waiting for the others to follow. An indignant groan goes up behind her in response, but she barely registers their footsteps, too busy focused on the goal ahead.

Red vest. Red shirt. She’s an idiot, because she’s not even looking. Too sick, too out of her head, too focused on all the wrong things. Too busy to see.

“Doctor!” Yaz jogs to catch up as she bursts through the doors, impatience and curiosity mingling. “Wait—so is this the end of the trail?”

“’Course it is,” the Doctor replies without even looking back. “Yaz, I’m an idiot! Red vests. Why didn’t I look for the red vests?”

“Red vests?” Ryan comes up beside them, huffing slightly. “Why would it— _oh_.”

“Yes.” She doesn’t even look at them, but darts toward the tills. A cashier—a young man—gives her an odd look, probably because of the handkerchief still stuffed up her nose, but she ignores him, scanning down the line for the person she knows has to be there.

A youngish woman in a red vest. Close enough to eschew coincidence. Psychic energy pools around her feet, egging her on, even as the cashiers start to look up, first in interest, then in confusion.

“Sorry,” she lurches for a till, gripping the edge as the cashier rears back in surprise. An older woman, dark-skinned and dark-haired, and definitely not who she’s looking for. “I need to find a woman. Youngish, wearing a red vest. Works here, probably. I need, uh, customer assistance.”

The woman’s gaze runs over her, baffled, and then slots into suspicion. “Hang a sec—you’re the woman who stole that mango!”

“I—what?” The Doctor gapes at her, just as the others catch up, this time fully panting. 

“Doc, you can’t keep taking off,” Graham huffs, hand on his chest. “I know we run a lot, but—”

“No, no.” Her eyes are still on the woman, who glares back, arms crossed. “I didn’t steal it. I mean—doesn’t matter. How can you know about that?”

_Not a dream_ , spins around in her head, sending a chill of excitement through her. Not a dream, but something else. An alternate timeline, maybe. The walls between growing thin, reality dissolving into an amalgamation of things that shouldn’t happen.

But humans don’t have the sense for it, she thinks wildly. About as time sensitive as rocks, the lot of them, which can only mean that—

“Oh, it’s fine, Marie.” A new voice sounds behind them, and the Doctor spins, hands slipping on the till. Too much of a spin—the world wavers, the ground slipping beneath her feet.

Something is changing in the air. Electric, and dead, like a body reanimated. She swallows hard, and, as the fam turn in confusion to face the newcomer, can’t help but feel like she’s lost in something far beyond her understanding. 

“Hi, Jillian.” Her throat is dry. Her tongue is swollen in her mouth. Jillian only gives a genial smile. 

“Nice to see you back, love.” Her eyes drop to the Doctor’s pocket. “Was wondering if you meant to return that.”

“I—uh—” Desperate, the Doctor casts her eyes over Jillian’s shoulder, past the bewildered fam, to the other tills. Two down, a young man passes items through, and beyond that, an older gentleman helps a middle aged woman. None of them fit. None of them make sense.

Her eyes slide back to Jillian, drop to her shirt. No nametag, no vest, but psychic energy swirls around her, malevolent and waiting. 

“This doesn’t make sense,” she says aloud. Everybody is staring at her, as if she’s gone off her rocker. She’s not sure she has. She’s not sure she hasn’t. 

Behind her, Marie sighs. “Oh, you can keep the mango. But really, I ought to be reporting this—”

“No.” The Doctor whirls around, digs into her pocket and pulls the mango out, thumping it onto the conveyor. It’s wrinkled and putrid, its green skin sticky. “No, you don’t understand. We’ve slipped sideways. All of us. The walls of reality are too thin—”

“Too thin to hold us,” Yaz says behind her, but when the Doctor whips around, Yaz’s eyes are soft and brown and entirely her own.

“Yes,” the Doctor whispers, her gaze roaming over her face, searching fruitlessly. “Yes. They’re—something is invading this town, carving it out, changing—”

“Doc—” Graham starts forward, but the Doctor waves him off, sagging against the till.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” she admits, and a wild sense of hilarity sweeps over her. “I don’t know what’s happening.”

Her vision dims blue. Outside, gray gathers. The world isn’t dissolving, but it’s closing in, and her head has gone wonky and Jillian is stepping closer, concern on her face.

“Dear—” she reaches out to touch her arm, but the Doctor pushes her away, tries to stand, and doesn’t make it. Something wet drips onto her lip, and she realizes belatedly that the handkerchief is soaked through, soggy with a nosebleed that never quite stopped.

“The timelines,” she slurs, her own knees giving out beneath her. “The timelines are—”

And then blue invades her vision, the world seeping away, and she doesn’t even feel it when she hits the floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> doctor: queen of fainting


	6. time future contained in time past

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> no edits yes this is nonsense im sorry also hi im back

In her dreams, she stands barefoot on Gallifrey, and listens to the crackle of of a city as it burns. Ash floats through the air, settles on her shoulders like snow. She doesn’t brush it off. Her toes dig into the sand, and she’s reminded momentarily of another beach, another planet, another loss.

Ridiculous. She wore shoes and a pinstriped suit on that beach, and her feet never touched the sand. She wasn’t even there, not really.

Before her, the Citadel blazes in an agony of destruction, endless and ephemeral at once. The whole planet exists only in a single moment, she knows, a pocket universe outside of the universe itself, but it seems to burn forever. Probably it will, until the pocket universe, unmaintained and left to rot, decays into nothing.

Then she truly will be the last of her lot. Homeless, for all of eternity.

In her dreams, she falls to her knees, grains of sand digging into her shins, and her fingers scrape through the dirt, bloody and cracked. Hot tears fill her eyes, sobs choke her throat, and she cries like a child abandoned in a shop. The sudden, overwhelming panic of a life stranded.

She doesn’t know where to go anymore. There’s nobody left to go to. The only person who would ever understand is the last person she can stand to look in the eye. She knows if she does, she’ll only see destruction reflected back at her, behind a smirking smile and a twitch that belies a grief he won’t admit.

So she kneels on her home planet and cries for a life and a people she abandoned anyway, because she doesn’t know what else to do.

Time passes. Gallifrey burns, slow and quiet, and warming her chest like hands held too close to a campfire. Civilizations rise, and fall. The landscape recedes. The dreamscape shifts, and when she looks up, Daleks fill the sky. Scream fill her ears, the screams of a woman murdered, and then those of a civilization destroyed, crowding and cacophonous and overwhelming, and she shrinks back, clamping her hands over her ears, but they rise despite, louder and louder, until she can’t—she can’t—

She jerks awake, drawing startled cries, and bolts straight up in her seat, chest heaving. 

“Oh, thank god!” A fervent voice to her left, which she registers a moment later to be Yaz. She doesn’t look at her. Her eyes fix on the floor, off-white lino, grimy with dust and wear, and she blinks under fluorescent lights.

“Where—” Her voice is raspy with tears. She hopes, irrationally, that they haven’t fallen. “Where am I?”

“Hospital, love.” Graham’s voice is warm and sympathetic, but the words cut right through into white-hot panic. “You fainted. We’re in the A&E.”

“Yeah, only they couldn’t see you immediately.” Ryan’s voice is disapproving, threaded through with an undercurrent of worry. “They’re so full, because of the—”

“Casualties.” When the Doctor looks up, Yaz is watching her with worried eyes. Her lips are pursed, her hands together, paused as if mid-churn. The Doctor blinks at her owlishly, then glances up, cold dread sinking through her.

They are in the A&E. She can recognize it immediately, if by the smell alone. Everything is off white and gray blue, down to the faux-leather on the seats they’re occupying and the striped patterns on the desk at the end of the hallway. Harsh lights flicker overhead, and harried medical personnel move about, none of them sparing their group a second glance.

It’s easy to see why. The A&E is absolutely stuffed with people, every seat occupied, the injured spilling out into the hallway. Everybody is drawn with impatience and fear, and though mumbling complaints rise and fall, everybody speaks in hushed tones, like they expect to be overheard. Urgency hovers in the air like a low-hanging cloud, settling on shoulders and brushing the tops of heads.

The Doctor stares, cold panic stirring in her, though she’s not sure why. Partly because she’s in a hospital, surely and brought not of her own volition to boot, but also because there’s something else here, something she’s not getting.

Everything is tinged with blue, she thinks tiredly. The entire world, washed out of color. Something’s gone and sucked it all away.

She stares at the blue stripes on the reception desk for several long moments, then tears her gaze away and looks to Yaz.

“Casualties?” Her lips are numb. She can barely force words past them. Her entire body is shaky and cold, like she’s caught a bad bug, but she’s pretty sure Time Lords don’t get bugs, earlier protestations aside. Not the way humans do. Not without strange things afoot.

Something is wrong, and it sits in the room like an elephant. Nobody says it. Nobody sees it except her.

“Yeah.” Yaz’s lips move, but her voice is far away, and the Doctor can’t tell if that’s supposed to be happening, or if it’s just a side effect of whatever’s affecting her. If she could only figure it _out_ — “From the last attack. Sheffield didn’t get hit too bad, but we caught a lot of the blowback. And, you know—”

“It’s always blowback.” Ryan leans back in his seat, disgusted, or maybe just angry. Something certainly sparks in his eyes, something she’s seen before but never bothered to parse. Righteous indignation, maybe. Like he’s seen too any unfair things happen, and he’s finally sick of watching.

But that’s not him, she thinks with slow-moving urgency, like shoving a stick in molasses. That’s not him, that’s her, who’s seen too much of the universe and just keeps on running, because by now there’s nothing to go back to. Ryan doesn’t get to have that look. It’s not how things go.

“Blowback,” she echoes, and struggles back to the conversation, grasping for a thread to pick up on. Something is important here, she’s sure of it. If she could just bloody _think_. “Attacks. Who’s attacking? Nothing should be attacking.”

Graham shrugs, and shifts in his seat with an air of displaced blame, as if it’s not her fault but he certainly thinks it is. “Well, it’s not attacks, is it? It’s the cities they keep scooping. Against the Nightmare Child. They took London, that’s what I heard.”

“And Paris,” Yaz puts in, her eyes crinkled in deepset worry. The kind that says she’s been around this bend before, but it just keeps getting worse. “Two in one hit. It just keeps getting worse.” She glances worriedly to Ryan, who nods in agreement, his jaw tight.

“The Nightmare Child?” the Doctor says, and as she does, thoughts start to coalesce, realization forming. “Oh—no, but—”

She glances around the A&E, eyes skimming over the hushed crowds, the harried nurses, and something sinks in her chest. “But it can’t be,” she whispers, and knows at the same time that it very much is.

Temporal disregulation, she thinks blearily. Nothing about this is right. Nothing about this should be happening, not now, not in this universe. But it’s spreading now, she can feel it on the back of her neck. Psychic energy prickling at her senses, sending her brain foggy and her tongue swollen in her mouth.

She wants to sleep. She can’t sleep. She can’t be here either, not in this antiseptic prison of death and decay, to watch humans wither into nothingness. It’s the last thing she ever wants to see. It’s the last place she ever wants to occupy.

She hates hospitals.

“I have to go,” she gasps, and lurches abruptly to her feet, coat swinging around her knees. She rocks on her heels, nearly keels forward, and steadies only as Yaz lunges forward and catches her wrist.

“Doctor!”

“Let go of me,” she mumbles, and tries to yank her wrist free, though she knows it’s not the polite thing to do. She can’t help it; she’s long since careened past polite and crashed in desperation, and it flickers at her stomach like the low-rising flames of a burned out bonfire, licking up the last of the tinderwood. 

Yaz doesn’t let go. Instead she tightens her grip and launches to her feet, Graham and Ryan following on her tail.

“Doctor, you’re not well.” Her voice is firm, as are the fingers that wrap around her wrist. “You need medical attention, and if you leave now—”

“You _don’t_ tell me what to do.” With one almighty jerk, the Doctor snatches her hand away and spins around, reeling momentarily with the motion. Her visions blurs, then snaps into focus, and quickly, before Yaz can respond, she takes a step back.

“You don’t,” she repeats shakily, her fingertips trembling at her sides. Yaz opens her mouth to reply, then shuts it again. Hurt flashes across her expression.

“Oi, mate.” Ryan steps forward, his voice quiet but hard. “You don’t get to talk to her like that. To any of us like that, actually.”

“Ryan is right.” Graham steps forward as well, and the Doctor glances wildly to him, and nearly takes another step back, catching herself just in time. She feels cornered, like an animal who can’t flee, and her hearts are pounding, her head swimming, and all she can think is that she’s losing time and _they don’t even know it_. “I know you’re scared, cockle, but you’ve got to see things from our side. We didn’t know what to do. A&E was pretty much our only option.”

“You don’t understand.” Her voice is hoarse, rough even to her own ears. Fear scrapes along the edges, badly disguised in temper. “You can’t just—I don’t need medical attention. Time is coming apart, and if I don’t—”

“We bloody well know that,” Graham says crossly, and the Doctor’s gaze jerks to him in surprise. “We do, don’t we? Whole bloody war bearing down on us—we’ve been well warned, Doc. We’re talking about you.”

The Doctor only stares at him, muddled thoughts seeping into confusion. “No,” she says stupidly, and doesn’t even have the words to string together. Her brain is mush, and it’s impossible to work her voice around it. “That’s not—this isn’t right, Graham. The war is over. It should be over.”

“Should it be?”

The air cools. The hairs on the back of the Doctor’s neck rise. For a long moment, she doesn’t look. Can’t look, even though she knows that voice, heard it once in a dream that might not have been a dream.

“Doctor.”

Everything has gone quiet. Graham is watching her anxiously, as is Yaz, their eyes large with worry. Ryan, just slightly behind, only watches. His eyes are dark and flat, nothing but a void within.

The Doctor swallows dryly, feels saliva move down her throat. Around them, the hush of anxious conversation has dulled to a distant hum. Something moves outside, and she feels it the way she sometimes feels rain on the wind.

“Who are you?”

Ryan doesn’t answer. He only watches her, head at a tilt, chin up. Eyes calm and curious, despite the movement that she can definitely feel now, the shift of a world about to change. Something malevolent bearing down on the city, on the entire planet, maybe, and her helpless inside an A&E, because the people who were supposed to be her friends brought her here.

Something is going to happen. Panic thuds dully in her chest, bang-bang between her hearts. Something is going to happen, Something is going to happen, and she can’t even—

Ryan looks at her squarely, regarding. Then, slowly, a smile creeps across his face. There’s nothing malicious about it, and somewhere at the back of her head-gone-to-mush, she’s surprised.

“Thank you.”

The Doctor stares. Then, she turns and runs.

People part like the Red sea, diving in slow motion hurry, soundless and distant and gray, and it’s only behind her, like a wave rising to crash, that noise and color erupts in a panic. She’s running through a movie scene, she thinks in a hysterical burst of mirth, that she’s not part of. The entire world behind her sliding into a reality that shouldn’t be, and if she could only get outside, if she could only—

She bursts through the doors, nearly falls to her knees and saves herself just in time, and in the second she takes to straighten, she sees that it’s already too late.

The world is being eaten. Bit by bit, like a child scooping peanut butter out of the jar, pieces of the city unwind in bursts of twisted gold, spiraling into the nothing that can only exist between time. A fate worse than death—non-existence.

Earth lost to the Time War, the Doctor realizes, a lump on her throat and horror in her chest, and she helpless to stop it.

And she left her friends behind.

Realization hits like a brick, and she spins around, but the hospital is no longer there. There’s a flat block now, and then it twists into an empty street, and then an office building, and then a row of shops, and then a school, and then more, faster and faster, spinning out possibilities like a cyclone, the screams of a thousand lives spiraling into the distance and she stares, and thinks about screaming but doesn’t have the voice too.

Instead her chest collapses, turning her so numb that her breath collects mist in the air. She stares as the possibility that was once a timeline that was once a hospital withers and dies, and then turns. Before her, the city lies in breathing ruins. It’s still alive, but barely. Scavengers are starting to move through, bits of malicious timelines gobbling up the good parts and leaving decay in their wake. They’ll start small, she knows. Pick people off one by one. She needs to get out of here, if she wants to live.

Unless she can stop it.

She can’t. Certainty gives voice in her head, insistent and damning. Somewhere deep in her gut, nausea stirs, and exhaustion seeps into her bones. It’s all she can do to stand on her own two feet, and even that isn’t looking good.

For a long moment, she just stands there, numb and dizzy, and watches the city die. Then, slowly, she reaches into her pocket and starts to rummage.

Her sonic is still there. She grips it, feels the first hint of relief, warm as a drop of hot water, then pulls it out and waves it in front of her at random. She knows what she’s looking for, and by now, she’s pretty sure she’ll find it.

A psychic trail, crisscrossing the city, and how many times has she run across it? Too many to be a coincidence, and she doesn’t believe in those anyway. There’s a much simpler explanation, if she cares to believe it. If she can admit that she has more of a hand in this than she realizes.

A trail isn’t always what you leave behind. A trail is also what guides you. And who says trails can only work backwards?

Not a trail of where she’s been, the Doctor thinks blearily, but a trail of where she’s going. A psychic imprint of her future, bleeding back through time. Because all of time is bleeding now, thanks to her. Somehow.

And she’s going to solve it.

The sonic lights up immediately, right in front of her, and she almost smiles. Almost. Her lip twitches, and doesn’t quite make it, so instead she simply holds out her sonic, tucks her other hand under her armpit, and steps forward, into the shadows of a dying city.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hmmmmm idk about this chapter but sometimes u just gotta cross ur fingers and yeet


End file.
